This lecture given by New Castle Count Cooperative Livestock agent, Dan Severson, focused on the livestock portion of Delaware’s agriculture industry. Severson broke down the amount of the beef, pork, goat, chicken that is produced and consumed from Delaware. Additionally, he included the amount of products that come from the different animals. Apparently, the highest amount of livestock that was recorded was cattle, which 225 farms, containing roughly 14,000 cattle in the state of Delaware alone. However, Delaware cattle size does not compare to the amount of cattle livestock contained in the entire US, which is 70 million cattle over the span of 711,000 farms. Switching from direct livestock, Dan Severson shared with the class the trends that are commonly found in  the agriculture community, which are # of farms, size of the farm, age of farmer, amount of animals, and diversification. It also seems that as time passes by, there is a growing interest of consumers wanting to know where there food comes from. Unfortunately, that also leads to some individuals sharing false information to people about how their food is processed, especially when it comes to the topics of GMO. However, sometimes stores and some people have ended up mislabeling their product, because they include the GMO free label. The thing is, GMO is mostly used by breeding and not actually injecting something into the food. Another claim is that farmers are putting antibiotics into the products, but since it is illegal to do so, that argument doesn’t hold up. The only registered animal that is allowed to be processed with GMO’s is fish, mainly salmon. Overall, Severson wanted us to know where the food comes from and what actually goes into farming.

GMO Extra Credit

For my GMO research project, I went to the store and found a product called “Outshine: Fruit Bars”. This item is a supposed an all natural popsicle, that used real fruit juice. Its main claim on it’s package is that it’s GMO free. The issue I found with this is that there was another popsicle produced by the same company, which did not also included the GMO free label. The weird thing is that the only difference was it’s flavor being coconut, instead of strawberry. If the strawberry flavored popsicle is supposedly non GMO, then why isn’t the coconut. Artificial flavoring is artificial flavoring, no matter what the flavor is.