Blake Hurst has an alternative opinion to Michael Pollan/Food, Inc., titled "The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals." Pollan is the ag writer and author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, a critique of modern agriculture and the food it produces. Hurst is a Missouri farmer and is writing for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He's had enough:

"Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store."

And: "But farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world, and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us."

Rain swept through northeastern Arkansas Wednesday, drenching fields and filling creeks. In Texas, however, the land is so dry that that deer are dying. In Zavala and Uvalde counties, no rain has fallen at all since September 22, 2008. The Corpus Christi paper is running a series on the drought in south and central Texas. (You can get to it here.)  In today's story, the paper reports that deer herds — hunting is an important source of income for ranchers there — re begin devastated by the drought. Some ranchers are paying up to $800 a week for water just to keep deer alive.

In other counties, ranchers are selling cattle not just because they are expensive to feed, but because the animals are scalping pasture. The state expects to lose over $4 billion in agriculture production by the end of the year -- including $869 million in livestock and $105 million in goats, sheep and honey. Wednesday, while rain flooded streets in eastern Oklahoma temperatures in Central Texas reached 105 degrees.

Senators from Montana and Wyoming gutted a program that would require most livestock producers to tag their animals with electronic devices. The Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee unanimously cut in half the funding for the National Animal Identification System, reports Tom Lutey of the Billings Gazette. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has argued that the tagging system would allow easy tracking of diseased animals. The USDA has spent $142 million developing the system.

NAIS is widely hated (and massively distrusted) in most ag communities. Opposition has been adamant, especially in the West. And so two western senators — Jon Tester (above), a Montana Democrat, and Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican — teamed up to do in the program by cutting funding. Tester maintains that food safety concerns center in processing plants, not in fields and pastures. "This basically cuts funding by $7.3 million," Tester said. "It basically kind of does what I want to have done, which is take some of the steam out of this program."

"This has Tester over the chest of NAIS with the stake in his hand and the hammer halfway toward a good swing, which is much better," said Dan Teigan of the Western Organization of Resource Councils.

Those who thought the "farm bloc" in Congress went the way of tail fins and rabbit ears have had a surprise, writes Dan Morgan in Sunday's Washington Post. A group of moderate to conservative Democrats from farm states and rural areas have "now hold the fate of health-care legislation in its hands," according to Morgan. They are also shaping the climate change bill and food safety legislation. "You might call these newly empowered farm-state lawmakers the Agracrats," Morgan writes. "They're Democrats, all right. In the House, many of them are newcomers who defeated Republicans in 2006 or 2008. In the Senate, Democrats have 12 of the 18 seats in the central farm belt and northern Great Plains." 

It was so much easier being a party that covered a limited amount of territory (ideological and geographic). Now the Democrats have to deal with the Agracrats and the Blue Dogs, the formal caucus of moderate Democratic House members. They overlap a bit and, Morgan writes, they "share a prairie-populist wariness of Wall Street and Washington that has been heightened by last year's financial meltdown and the ensuing government bailouts."

Going forward, according to Morgan, "agricultural interests will press to either kill or further rewrite the climate change bill." They are active on making sure rural hospitals get a fair shake in the health reform bill. And they keeping are protecting the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which they believe protects rural areas against manipulation of grain markets.