Family Dairy Farmers Appeal to Obama Administration for Swift Enforcement

WASHINGTON, DC: Aurora Dairy, based in Boulder, Colorado, the nation’s largest organic dairy producer, is once again facing allegations of improprieties. Aurora had previously been found in “willful” violation of multiple federal organic standards by USDA investigators in 2007.

This week an organic industry watchdog, The Cornucopia Institute, filed a formal legal complaint with the USDA in Washington alleging that one of the five industrial-scale dairies operated by Aurora, its High Plains dairy near Kersey, Colorado, is failing to graze their dairy cattle as required by the federal organic standards. Read Full Article »

Posted in Aurora Factory Farm Operations, Cornucopia News

Detroit Free Press
By Joe Rossiter

A pilot program designed to offer Detroiters healthier food choices and easier access to fresh fruits and vegetables was announced Tuesday by Gov. Jennifer Granholm outside Peaches & Green, a produce store in Detroit.

Operating much like ice cream vendors, trucks bearing fresh fruits and vegetables and sporting logos of MI Neighborhood Food Movers are to drive through city neighborhoods on designated routes and during assigned times. Read Full Article »

Posted in Media/News

The Seattle Times
By Linda V. Mapes

Bumblebees assiduously comb the purple blooms of thistles, seeking nectar.

Native pollinators such as these fat, fuzzy bumblebees, once an overlooked sideshow in the insect world, are gaining widespread appreciation among everyone from backyard gardeners to big-time farmers. That’s because European honeybees, the pollination mainstay of commercial agriculture, continue to struggle, with bee keepers routinely losing 30 percent of their bees every winter. Yet farmers count on those bees to pollinate some $15 billion in crops annually.

The European honeybee is the solo act of industrial agriculture. But in natural landscapes, there has always been a diversity of pollinators busily at work: bumblebees, moths, flies, beetles, butterflies, birds, and bats, just to name a few. There are 4,000 native bees in the U.S. alone, and at least 17,000 species known on the planet. And some of them make European honeybees look like slugabeds: Bumblebees will work when it’s cool and cloudy and honeybees refuse to fly. Read Full Article »

Posted in Media/News

Time Magazine
By Bryan Walsh

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He’s fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he’ll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That’s the state of your bacon — circa 2009. (See TIME’s site for story related photos, links and videos) Read Full Article »

Posted in Media/News

The New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist, NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

YAMHILL, Ore. — On a summer visit back to the farm here where I grew up, I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food,mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all.

More fundamentally, it has no soul. Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial