One sick cow in an industrial place poisons millions of pounds of beef. One sick cow in a traditional place poisons hundreds of pounds of beef.

The math works like this: what are the odds of every single animal in the batch being healthy? Because nothing else matters, one sick animal contaminates the batch.

Your chance of getting a burger that won't make you sick is
(1-P)^N
where P is the chance of any one animal being sick, and N is the number of animals. Assume P is constant between the traditional and the industrial, and look at what happens with large N. Look at an industrial farm and a traditional farm and tell me P isn't way less on the traditional farm, which makes the numbers far worse.

The math makes me suspect there are a lot of cases slipping by, contaminations that aren't caught, disease outbreaks that involve lots of people feeling pretty grungy but not going to the doctor or dying, or not mentioning the burger they had a week ago. Because even with a very small value of P, as N gets big, your chance of a non-toxic lunch goes down. Way down. Plug in some numbers and play.

There are economics of scale, but when I buy a quarter of a cow from a traditional place, I pay as much per pound for the whole thing as I do for low-grade industrial burger. And there is nothing in that quarter cow that would cost less than the low-grade burger.

NAIS is trying to reduce P.

And there are tons of factors that go into P, all kinds of questions that can be raised. Is it safer to dump antibiotics by the pound into a large herd or to pay attention to each animal? I have my opinion, big (ph|f)arma has theirs. We can argue.

But for N, there is no room to argue. N is how many animals go through the shredder before you shut it down and clean it out. And huge values of N are dangerous unless P is tiny.

There is a solution that works: traditional farms and food handling. Small value of N, people with a real stake paying attention and able to shut down and correct problems right away when needed to keep P low. No high tech needed. No tracking every animal from spawning to sewage. And for the tracking system to really work, you would have to track sewage, because that's where the problems tend to show up first.


Hey, maybe we can tie this in to the hand washing tracker.