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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

I've seen at least 10 different articles about this and not one of them names the company involved. Every article just calls it "a Weld County egg-laying facility" or an "egg-laying operation in Weld County"

It's kind of disturbing that information about where our food comes from is being kept hidden from us. The same thing happens whenever there are major food recalls. The names of the companies where the contaminated food came from are rarely revealed to the public.

In this instance, a few articles say the name of the facility is being kept secret due to something called the "Livestock Information Protection Act". Googling "Livestock Information Protection Act" only returns articles about this incident. Assuming that the Livestock Information Protection Act is a real thing that actually exists, I'd be interested in learning why it exists.

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These folks are so scared of transparency they've convinced representatives to make recording information about livestock production illegal. It's absolutely mind boggling that this isn't considered a big problem.

If you've seen documentaries like Earthings [1] its easy to tell why they want those video's to be illegal.

[1]https://archive.org/details/earthlings-704x-528

I saw a thing a few months ago where someone was trying to get some milk tested and the testing facility refused to do it without permission of the producer.

No law demanded this, it was just a business on one side of the industry looking out for the interests of one on another, to all of our detriment.

I think I found what you saw:

> You're right, Ailsa, it would really help to know if and how much virus is out there in the raw milk supply being sold now to people. But testing doesn't seem to be happening regularly, and that data is really hard to come by. That's why we tried to find our own. But when I brought raw milk that I bought from those four Texas farms to one of the few labs authorized by the USDA to test milk for bird flu, the lab insisted on calling each of the four farms first for permission, though the USDA has confirmed the agency doesn't require permission from farms to perform the test.

> None of the farms gave the lab permission to run the tests. They told the lab they were aware of what a non-negative result would do for their business. So the lab refused to test our samples. That means we weren't able to find out how much virus was in the raw milk being sold now in Texas, and probably it's very difficult for other members of the public to do that, too.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251647612/a-bird-flu-outbrea...

reminds me of how the Seattle Flu Study blew the whistle on covid community transmission, during the start of the pandemic in the US.

at the time, the CDC only allowed testing for known exposures and travel to China. their lab wasn't authorized to test for covid. but they broke the rules and did so anyway, and when they saw positive cases they raised the alarm.

the CDC had the actual gall to threaten them, but the cat was out of the bag. the country couldn't bury its head in the sand anymore.

hopefully some USDA-unauthorized labs will test for bird flu, even if the official labs are too chicken.

That's it, thank you!

https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/images/olls/200... - Livestock Information Security Act, probably what's being referred to and was the first link returned by Google when I searched for your phrase of "Livestock Information Protection Act".

I'm guessing that is the act. Interesting that googling "Livestock Information Security Act" doesn't bring up any articles about this incident (at least not for me). The governor's office must have given the wrong name to the press at some point and everyone just ran with it without checking to see if it even existed.

It doesn't look like there's been any real discussion about that act online either.

Well... lazily scanning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weld_County,_Colorado and from there to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greeley,_Colorado... leads to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=JBS_USA&oldid=123...

No other 'suitable' corporation is listed under any other place in Weld County.

While Wikipedia is possibly very incomplete, this still gives high confidence because of the sheer size, which lists JBS Greely as largest employer with 5,141 employees as of May 1, 2023.

That sounds like a lot of chicken, densely packed. And thus higher probability of such things happening.

Of course it could be some other, smaller farm, but how likely is that?

edit: changed into permanent links, just to be safe from edit wars, white-washing, whatever.

Doesn’t the anonymity reduce the incentive companies would otherwise have to hide or underplay infections?

It also keeps the public from learning about which companies have repeated problems. If we were allowed to know where our food comes from, and where contaminated or infected food comes from, we could avoid buying products from those places and reward the facilities that are cleaner, inspect themselves well enough to protect the public, and don't have a long history of making people sick. We could also pressure the government to do more about the facilities that have the most problems.

More incentive to buy from local farmers who you know where possible.

Given the name of the egg-laying facility is there a reasonable way for an egg buying consumer to figure out which brands of eggs at their local supermarket might contain eggs from that facility?

Not reasonably enough. I decided to stop buying eggs from Cal-Maine Foods after they were repeatedly caught price gouging/fixing. At one point early in the pandemic their profits were up 718% from last quarter. Their supply chain wasn't impacted and at the time there hadn't been a single positive test for avian flu at any of their facilities. (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/California-lawsuit-al...) Their profits soared at a time when a lot of Americans were unable to work and were having trouble just paying rent and keeping bills paid.

It took some searching, including through their financial statements over the years, but I managed to get pretty long list of brands they supply and/or distribute for. I've got a list of brands to avoid, but I still can't be confident that other brands seen in stores are totally unaffiliated. As consumers we can only do our best though. If you can find a local farm with chickens, that's probably your best bet.

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