Can't say the thought of intentional human action being the cause didn't occur to me also.
Although while the remant in the livestock industry is untra-paranoid about greenies you'd also have to look at people with the potential for financial gain.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, our nation was organized around the principle of opposition to a very powerful enemy that just happened to have a vast biological weapons capability. In that time there was a modest ongoing effort in small corners of the traditional national security establishment to keep tabs on strategic vulnerability of the food supply.
That enemy went away and we maybe more or less cleaned up most of their bioweapons capacity. But then there was a biological attack on the nation with anthrax that turned out to have originated in a U.S. Army bioweapons lab. The FBI chased one guy for years and ended up paying him a multi-million $ settlement for defamation of character. Then they landed on another creepy dude who committed suicide and they closed the case. FWIW, the National Academy of Sciences says that the scientific case for that conclusion wasn't made (just another conspiracy among scientists).
So anyway, we spent $ billions of DHS pork barrel payola to pass around to states, universities and the USDA because we suddenly had huge, I'm telling you, huge exposure to bio and agro-terrorism.
Which all just makes me feel slighted because back in the day when we had a diverse food production system with a multitude of producers- and had a real enemy with very real capabilities- nobody much cared about us (and there wasn't the degree of exposure, because of the aforementioned facts). But when you've thrown a few tens of $billions around to combat a problem that barely exists, it now officially exists.
So we have, as I said, vast pork barrel spending, agro-terrorism laws, ag gag laws and a whole host of abominations which are necessary becasue as we all know, we're much more efficient now and all reaping the benefits.
Anyway, that's why I haven't signed up for any Speak Up for Agriculture contests lately.
