The U.S. Department of Agriculture is holding 'listening sessions' on its plan to tag farm animals. Yonder writer Richard Oswald drives to Jefferson City, Missouri, to testify.

Europe is headed toward a continent-wide election — and to promote the event, voters are being told the new Parliament will decide how food is labeled.

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that ranchers are downsizing...their cattle. Writer P. J. Huffstutter reports from Nebraska about some ranchers who are raising minicows, stocky little critters with smaller frames and smaller appetites. These "miniature Herefords consume about half that of a full-sized cow yet produce 50% to 75% of the rib-eyes and fillets, according to researchers and budget-conscious farmers," Huffstutter reports. "We get more sirloin and less soup bone," said Ali Petersson (above, with cow). "People used to look at them and laugh. Now, they want to own them." 

There is a trend, according to the Times. Dairy farmers are picking up mini Jerseys, little cows that can produce two to three gallons of milk a day. The mini Herefords weigh in at between 500 and 700 pounds each. There are more than 300 mini Hereford breeders in the U.S. and there are now 20,000 minicows in the country, up from 5,000 a decade ago. (Okay, there are more than 94.5 million head of cattle in the U.S., so the minis aren't taking over.)

 These cattle aren't genetically engineered to be small. They come from the original breeds brought to the U.S. from Europe. As U.S. farmers and ranchers produced more grains, they didn't worry about the price of feed as much as the amount of beef on a single cow. "Feed prices were relatively cheap, and grazing lands were accessible," a Purdue University professor said. "The plan was to get more meat per animal. But it went way too far. The animals got too big and eat so much." The microcattle are a return to earlier times. And, hey, there are even been a mini bucking bull rodeos! 

Has the way we raise hogs helped create the swine flu variant that is now spreading across the globe? Mike Davis, in a column in the Guardian, writes that "corporate industrialisation of livestock production" in China and now across the world has transformed animal husbandry "into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers." He quotes a report from the Pew Research Center last year warning that industrial animal production causes a continual cycling of viruses that "increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in a more efficient human to human transmission."

Davis' column is based on a warning that appeared in a March 2003 article in Science magazine. Bernice Wuethrich wrote that "after years of stability, the North American swine flue virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track, churning out variants every year. Changes in animal husbandry, including increased vaccination, may be spurring this evolutionary surge. And researchers say that the resulting slew of dramatically different swine flue viruses could spell danger for humans, too. The evolving swine flue 'increases the likelihood that a novel virus will arise that is transmissible among humans,' says Richard Webby, a molecular virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee."

Pigs are good "mixing vessels" where human, bird and hog viruses can swirl and match, producing new and sometimes deadly strains. The last two flu pandemics occurred when avian and human flu viruses swapped genes in pigs.