Week two, Trip to Sevens Mountains

On Thursday June 2^nd we started our visit to the Sevens Mountains, to visit local productions of cheese, sheep meat, and cow meat. As we met with this producers of what is in France a “large scale production” of sheep meat. This people wouldn't allow visitors to their farm, since they are considered cruel because they have “so many animals” (400 sheep) and the space they are in winter is not big enough. We also visited a cow meat producer who had also about 400 cows and considered a very large production. And they had the same problem with letting people in, even though that family has done that since several generations.

Both of this types of farms are currently are having restrictions because of new legislation, caused by increasing environmentalist strikes on “large production farms” where animals are feed in a cage. Environmentalists argue that they are altering the normal way an animal grows and that the ecosystem is modified when the feed lots are made. This results in the amounts of cows grown being limited, even though they have more than enough space for more cows.

The current “solution” France farmers are finding to the cows not allowed in feed lots is to feed the cows in pastures making them as fat as they can, and then selling them to feed lots in Italy. Italy will increase their weight in feed lots and sell the meat back to France keeping most of the revenue.

I find this wrong because the government knows this is a problem; that Italy is making all the money in the process and that they can’t do anything about it because they are too afraid of a small minority doing strikes. As the governing unit they should allow feed lots and other agricultural expansions to occur, having in mind the whole country's economy and small farmers business, not only for the few environmentalists that oppose all changes that want to be made.