As a dairy farmer's daughter and employee in the agricultural industry, I find that there's the farmer side of the story that isn't be told in many cases. Please keep in mind a few points when reading this or other stories:

1. Farmers do NOT make a rich living by being in production agriculture because food prices are so cheap compared to production costs. Farmers are farmers because they absolutely LOVE what they do. I work in the Registered Holstein industry and those I work with LOVE to take care of cows. Yes, they do provide a source of income for us, but they wouldn't if we didn't take care of them. We want and MUST take care of our animals for them to produce milk.

2. Milk is tested and retested before it enters the human food chain. Be assured that it passes all tests and is free of antibiotics and anything else that doesn't naturally occur in milk before hitting the supermarkets. bST is a naturally occurring hormone found in milk.

3. Most all of us care about our jobs and feel that feeding the world is our calling. Let's not make it a war of worlds. Get the facts - and listen to both sides of the story!

Is a farmer and long-time supported of organic and natural food production and consumption I have two things to add to the final point of this well-considered and insightful story:

1. When encouraging your representatives (at both state and federal levels) to put more stringent food safety laws into effect (which is certainly important) be sure to let them know that legislation must be framed in a way that it won't shut down the small, local producers of high quality foods you want to continue to be able to buy and enjoy.
One way to do this is to write food safety laws so that they exempt farmers and producers who sell directly to their consumers from requirements that would have a small financial impact on mega-producers but crippling financial impact on small farmers. For example: Requiring that all salad greens get a disinfecting bath or be irradiated and that X-number of samples from each batch be tested for pathogens at the producer's expense may, in fact, be an excellent idea for operations that handle greens by the truck load -- but it would be unsustainable for a small producer who washes her greens in ten pound batches or not at all (do you really want that beautiful, clean, just-picked head of heirloom lettuce at the farmers' market dipped in chlorine anyway?) Faced with the costs and time required to comply that small producer would most likely stop producing lettuce, leaving you back at the supermarket buying tired, tasteless leaves shipped thousands of miles from the mega-farms.
2. Also ask your representatives to be sure that food safety laws be firmly based on scientific fact, rather than quick fixes that sound logical but actually have little impact on real problems. For example: When the Avian Flu was topmost in everyone's mind legislators were quick to point the finger on small producers with flocks of healthy birds -- even though there was no solid evidence that outdoor birds were more likely to become infected (despite what you saw daily in the media) and quite a bit of solid evidence that birds in confinement mega-farms were at high risk and most likely the source of dangerous strains in the first place. Forcing small farmers to raise their birds inside a "nice safe building" with no outdoor access sounded logical and suited the big poultry lobby to a T -- but it didn't improve human safety one iota, put farmers who couldn't or wouldn't confine their flocks out of the poultry business, and deprived local consumers of the eggs and fresh chicken they wanted and enjoyed.

So, yes. PLEASE demand change -- just be sure to specify what that change should accomplish and what it should protect.