Simmons tells Fox News farm practices cause heart disease, diabetes, cancer, global warming
By Bill Brown, Editor, Farms.com
Hip-hop music icon Russell Simmons raised eyebrows in the farm industry when he claimed that “the factory farming industry is poisoning us in America.”
Simmons was interviewed on the Fox News Network’s Fox Business in promotion of his book The Happy Vegan, and argued that the U.S. agriculture industry is hurting people’s health, as well as degrading the environment.
He pointed at the farming industry as the cause for heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
“It’s illegal everywhere else to make life, and put the stuff in the life, that we do.”
For an example, Simmons claimed farmers in Australia, Germany and England produced smaller chickens because they do not administer the amount of antibiotics and growth hormones that U.S. poultry farmers do, in order to produce “giants.”
Simmons went on to point out that “cows are the greatest cause of global warming,” a statement refuted by Fox News host Charles Payne.
According to Simmons, the U.S. government “gives $30 billion to underwrite ‘cheap meat’ which is destroying the planet and poisoning the people. And they give no money to the vegetable industry, but $17 million.”
Simmons, 58, has been described as the third-richest figure in hip-hop, having a net-worth estimate of $340 million in 2011. He cofounded the music label Def Jam and created the clothing line Phat Farm.
Twitter reaction to Simmons’s interview was swift.
“The alternative to factory farming is mass starvation,” wrote one observer.
Another responded that Simmons “doesn’t get we have to feed nine billion people on less ground than we fed seven billion with less water in next 20 years.”
Finally: “Mr. Simmons needs to spend time on some farms and actually get info from said farmer and work for a week!”