Officials with Harris Ranch Beef Co. lobbied to have a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo faculty member quit teaching a class on animal agriculture last year because of what they saw as an anti-business bias, the San Luis Obispo Tribune reports.
Harris Ranch is one of California’s largest ranching operations, producing and marketing 150 million pounds of beef a year.
According to correspondence obtained by the Tribune through the California Public Records Act, Harris Ranch chairman David Wood sent an e-mail to Cal Poly president Warren Baker seeking Cal Poly professor Robert Rutherford 's removal from teaching “Issues in Animal Agriculture” after Harris Ranch official Michael Smith spoke with Rutherford on Sept. 14. The story notes:
Wood wrote in a Sept. 23 letter or e-mail that Rutherford had said 'grain-fed production systems were not sustainable, that corn should not be fed to cattle, and especially not in large-scale animal feeding systems.' ... 'Mr. Rutherford then had the audacity to offer Mike [Smith] an entirely unsolicited opinion that water should have never been provided to farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley,' Wood wrote Baker. 'As Harris Ranch operates one of the largest farms in this region, Mr. Rutherford implies Harris Ranch should not be farming.'
Rutherford, who has taught the class since its inception, says he has voluntarily decided to hand over the course to someone else.
The story comes a few months after Harris Ranch officials threatened to withdraw donations from the school if it didn’t change the format of a planned lecture by author and sustainable food advocate Michael Pollan in October 2009. At the time, Wood expressed his displeasure with giving Pollan an “unchallenged forum.”
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