Telling a cow from a bull

On those rare occasions when the nation's non-agricultural media cover some farm or ranch subject, the results are often hilarious. If not funny, they are usually at least pitiful.

Just as asking an inner-city child where milk comes from, they'll say either "cartons" or "the grocery store," the media thinks that if it walks like a cow, bellars like a cow and looks like a cow, it's a cow. Rarely does the mass media make the correct distinction between bulls (male cattle), cows (female cattle), and steers (neutered male cattle).

It's even worse if they're talking pigs. The male is called a boar, the female a sow and the neutered versions, gilts and barrows. They're all pigs, as far as the non-ag media is concerned. There's a reason city folks don't know the correct terms: the mass media doesn't tell them, because they don't know either. The difference is, its the job of the media to find out.

Similar ignorance comes through on just about any other farm story, be it corn, wheat, strawberrys or cotton. I've read all the stories from the health food extremists touting the healthfulness of soy. They rarely tie the product to the crop grown across the midwest and used for many different purposes: soybeans. You can just read between the lines, and assume they harvest those little soys somewhere.

And this is to say nothing of the overwhelming ignorance displayed in translating grocery prices from farm prices. Its rarely pointed out that a $2-$4 loaf of bread contains 5 cents worth of wheat. It's hardly ever pointed out that the reason milk is so expensive is the heavy dairy price supports pushed by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, to support the dairy farmers of his tiny state. All the heavy price you're paying at the supermarket for basic foodstuffs barely trickles back to the farmer who produced it.

What a differenc simple truth in the mass media on ag matters would bring to consumers.