The Green Fork is the official blog of the Eat Well Guide. Click here to Find Good Food.

Anyway, as if bike month wasn’t already mind-blowingly awesome enough, the Eat Well Guide is hosting the Tour de Farmers’ Markets on May 15! It’ll be kind of like the Tour de France except without the 2,200 grueling miles of high-speed cycling.

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Earlier this month I ventured down to the nation’s capital to attend Meeting the Demand: Growing Markets for Sustainable Meat and Dairy Production, a conference organized by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR). Turned out to be well-worth the epic all-in-one-day roundtrip subway/train ride; ICCR managed to cram the schedule full of speakers, panels, and workshops like pork in the farm bill. Lots of big ideas; lots of inspiring solutions.

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The thrust of the authors’ argument is that the “efficiency” of industrial ag enables factory farms to produce a given quantity of meat, eggs and/or dairy products with a smaller adverse environmental impact than less-efficient, traditional livestock farms. As you’d expect, there are a number of Major Flaws in their analysis – read quick descriptions of each flaw below; find detailed assessments after the jump.

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The shows (Bones and CSI: Miami) aren’t intended to be in-depth examinations of contemporary food production. But the stories include some good information about the ills of industrial ag – and we’re always glad when these issues percolate into the public consciousness.

Naturally, after viewing both programs, I felt compelled to pin them head-to-head in an epic showdown for the Best Industrial-Ag-Themed Cop Show Episode of 2009 Award.

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Back in the day (i.e., 30 or 40 years ago), small slaughterhouses existed throughout the U.S.; this was great for small farms since livestock could be processed locally without much hassle or expense. Unfortunately, the transition to factory farming spawned the creation of huge, highly mechanized, corporate-controlled mega-slaughterhouses, which ultimately put most small, independent slaughterhouses out of business.

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