Newsweek
By Tom Philpott

Five years ago, I gave up a career as a business writer in New York City to take over a small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina with several friends. From the start, our goal was to help rebuild an ecologically sane local-food economy accessible to everyone in our community, from the second-home owners and vacationers who flock in every summer, to year-round residents with deep historical ties to the area.

That modest-sounding goal proved to be extremely challenging. Profit margins on small-scale organic farming are numbingly low, even when you charge prices that low-income folks can’t afford. We quickly found ourselves in a paradox: we were growing great food for the rich—which is not what we set out to do—and losing our shirts doing it. Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial

Demand for locally grown food has farmers building greenhouses and trying cool-weather varieties.

Portland Press Herald Maine Sunday Telegram
By BETH QUIMBY, Staff Writer

The vegetable-growing season used to end with the first hard frost in Maine.

Not anymore.

An increasing number of farmers are pushing the growing season into the winter to take advantage of the surging demand for locally grown food. As a result, more farmers are operating greenhouses, branching out into cool-weather crops and creating new markets for their produce.

“Basically, people have gotten into it because their infrastructure is already there,” said Mark Hutton, vegetable specialist and assistant professor of vegetable crops with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. Read Full Article »

Posted in Media/News

New York Times
By ANDREW RICE

Dr. Robert Zeigler, an eminent American botanist, flew to Saudi Arabia in March for a series of high-level discussions about the future of the kingdom’s food supply. Saudi leaders were frightened: heavily dependent on imports, they had seen the price of rice and wheat, their dietary staples, fluctuate violently on the world market over the previous three years, at one point doubling in just a few months. The Saudis, rich in oil money but poor in arable land, were groping for a strategy to ensure that they could continue to meet the appetites of a growing population, and they wanted Zeigler’s expertise.

There are basically two ways to increase the supply of food: find new fields to plant or invent ways to multiply what existing ones yield. Read Full Article »

Posted in Media/News

Defend Organic Scofflaw in Court to Protect Corporate Takeover of Organics

CORNUCOPIA, WI – Two powerful lobby groups in the food industry, The Grocery Manufacturers of America and the Organic Trade Association, recently intervened as friends of the court in a federal consumer class-action lawsuit accusing the nation’s largest supplier of private-label organic milk of consumer fraud. In what has been described as “the largest scandal in the history of the organic industry” USDA investigators, in 2007, found that Aurora Dairy had willfully violated federal organic standards. However, industry lobbyists are now concerned that convicting Aurora will set a dangerous legal precedent. Aurora bottles private-label organic milk for Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Safeway and many other grocery chains.

In August 2007 Bush administration officials were widely criticized for overruling career staff at the USDA and instead of decertifying Aurora as staff had recommended, banning it from organic commerce, the corporate dairy was allowed to continue in business under a one-year probation. Now agribusiness lobbyists are concerned that citizens prevailing in court, alleging fraud, will set a precedent necessitating large corporations to incur added expenses to more carefully check the sources and credibility of their organic suppliers.

“Due diligence by food manufacturers and retailers is the heart and soul of what maintaining the integrity of the organic label is about,” said Mark Kastel, Codirector of The Cornucopia Institute, the farm policy research group that initially exposed the corruption taking place at Aurora. Read Full Article »

Posted in Cornucopia News

The Capital Times
Jim Goodman, farmer and Food and Society Fellows Program fellow

Why is conventional agriculture so wound up? Are they afraid of organic agriculture? What’s all the fuss about? After all, a recent study by the Lieberman Research Group showed that organic food sales account for only 3.5 percent of all food product sales in the U.S.

A column in the September 2009 Prairie Farmer leads me to believe that the author, a spokesperson for conventional agriculture, dislikes and even fears organic farming and its supporters.

The author admits to feeling self-satisfaction in knowing that organic farmers are suffering in a down economy. I doubt many people share her sentiments. Farmers generally have the attitude that “we are all in this together,” no matter what farming practices we use. Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial