Ohioans: Vote NO on Issue 2.

Issue 2 would create an industry dominated "animal care" council to set standards for farm animals in Ohio. The goal is to head off the state from passing anything like California's Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act (which banned veal crates, gestation cages, and battery cages) by taking the power to regulate farm animal treatment away from the voters.

Read more here, here, and here.

The text of the issue is here. Notice that the board is supposed to include a member of a local humane society. This is specifically to keep the Humane Society of the United Sates out of the picture. The HSUS was instrumental in getting California to insist that farmers keep animals in cages large enough to turn around, and were considering promoting similar legislation here when the state legislature decided to put Issue 2 on the ballot.

Vote No on 2!

Transgenic corn wandering into the food supply

Andrew Leonard has a post up arguing that the real problem with corn based ethanol is that it will create a market for all sorts of new varieties of transgenic corn. These transgenes will obviously wander into the food supply, because it turns out that gene flow is very hard to manage.

As an argument against corn ethanol, this is pretty weak. The market for transgenics is already so big it is only limited by the producers' ability to get new breeds to market. On the other hand, Leonard's article is a nice update on the world of transgenic corn, including an attempt by Monsanto to evade regulators for a new variety of high lysine corn for animal feed.