* Puppy mills fall under USDA regulation, because animals are livestock. The agency has been enabling cruelty on mass scale for years, through failure to police simple standards. http://www.caps-web.org/blogs/our-least-favorite-acronym/
* Remember the food pyramid? It's been tugged not by science but by grain and meat interests for years. eg, http://www.ruralvotes.com/thebackforty/?p=4805
* Grazing federal lands (USDA forest service...) is a subsidy for ranchers that damages via erosion and contamination. I'm okay with that but the cost should be borne by the ranchers and reflected in product pricing, not via the taxpayers.
* Meat inspection is a joke. Have you eaten any prions (CJD, mad cow) lately? No one knows because we don't require bulk testing. Hormones, antibiotics in the farm runoff? Bacterial resistance? You're paying for that in the long run too. Mor USDA failure to protect the public.
* Corruption? Sure: http://www.cornucopia.org/2015/05/latest-usda-scandal-organi...
Not my favorite agency.
What happens in the fall and winter is that they roost in mass in large trees in large numbers -- I'm talking tens of thousands of birds.
We tend to get them in our trees in the morning for some reason, and they aren't as active, so it isn't that big of a deal. But a few blocks away they land in the evening and make a lot of noise -- it's almost like car horns.
With the fireworks, they don't aim at them, but almost set them up in a "box" to agitate them. I think the objective is to get them broken up into smaller groups and move off to a less populated area. The freaky thing is the distressed crow noises coming from a PA in the back of the truck.
When they show up and start settings up, the crows swarm them and poop everywhere. It's pretty crazy.