20100202 agchat animal care opinion

All too often these days farmers are writing in worried about commercial agriculture's negative public image. Increasingly, they complain, people who know only what they read in the national media believe modern agriculture ravages the environment, abuses animals and produces food that causes obesity and endangers public health. What, the farmers ask, can DTN do to tell the other side of the story?

This is what consumers see with respect to information on animal rights, care, and welfare.

Beware Farm Bureau Bait-and-Switch

Beware the HSUS Bait-and-Switch

From a marketing perspective, milk has about as squeaky clean an image as you'll find. But behind the smiling celebrity milk moustaches, is there a darker side to dairy? A Brian Ross Blotter investigation tonight pulls back the curtain on what critics call dairy "factory farms," featuring graphic video of disturbing deletion treatment of milk cows at the Willet Dairy in East Genoa, New York.

Documentaries have been a major part of public education for years. We watch them in school, we hold special events to see them in colleges. They're played on television, they're promoted at movie theaters. Their budgets can be huge, or miniscule. But what really qualifies a production as a "documentary?"