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Flesh-eating screwworm infection confirmed in South Texas, USDA says(arstechnica.com)
3 commentsbyDrewski
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[-]x0x72(+1|0)

Don't go walking around with any open wounds. At least not in Texas.

I've done a bit of my own research on this. The good news is that this worm can't be endemic too far north. Any place that regularly gets under 50 degrees at night consistently isn't going to see this worm year-round.

But it will be able to travel in the summer. That's a problem for the Midwest because feeder calves will come up from Texas, closer to cheaper feed, and their end slaughter point since the US has a very centralized slaughter market.

My silly libertarian solution is this. Let Texas develop full vertical integration of the meat supply chain. Then you have less north-south movement of cattle, and this thing doesn't travel as easily in the summer. Ranchers already have a valid complaint that the law basically makes it impossible for them to process an animal on site and sell it directly to customers. Labeling requirements are already hard, but they could manage. The law requires that to process an animal to sell to retail, you have to have multiple inspectors on site. Basically, the law assumes an industrial setting, which is a clever regulatory capture to make it is the only way it can work. Even though almost any butcher can do a cleaner job than these factories anyway. That regulitory capture also means that meet packers get almost all the profit in the chain. Even letting ranchers flirt with anything down chain with help them make more money.

The result is that local meat is practically illegal to do at volume or sell in a way that's convenient to most people. And so we're migrating all these animals around. It also means these local economies don't develop other layers of the supply chain if the chain is going to get pinched at one point anyway.

Another solution. Let Texas secede. Florida too since it will probably end up there.

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[-]Drewski2(+1|0)

Hoping that Thomas Massie's recently passed PRIME act will make a difference in the local processing of meat.

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