Press Democrat
By ROBERT DIGITALE

Should an organic chicken be allowed to scratch outside in the native earth?

Federal farm experts meeting in Seattle this week are expected to consider this question, and the outcome could impact one of Sonoma County’s two main egg producers.

Petaluma Farms is a longtime supplier of organic and conventional eggs, all produced “cage free,” that is, without the small wire cages that confine most of the nation’s laying hens. Critics recently filed a federal complaint involving the company, saying the U.S. Department of Agriculture should require Petaluma Farms to give its organic hens access to soil outdoors, rather than limit their outside space to raised, screened porches. Read Full Article »

Posted in Uncategorized

The Tennessean
Written by Ronnie Barron For The Times

“Locally grown,” “organic” and “eat fresh” have become common buzz words in today’s society as more and more consumers look to buy fruits and vegetables from local farmers.

This interest is opening opportunities and new markets for local food producers to meet this demand. To give farmers a firsthand look at one such successful operation, UT Extension agent Ronnie Barron arranged a tour for five Cheatham County vegetable producers last week of an organic farm in Bowling Green, Ky. Read Full Article »

Posted in Media/News

Yahoo News
Karen W. Wyman

COMMENTARY | Findings from a recent study are making a case for organic meat. According to a study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, up to 50 percent of supermarket meat is contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria.

The study’s authors report that bacteria found inside the meat means the problem is the food animals themselves and not contamination from packing or processing. Many of the detected strains were drug resistant, suggesting that “densely stocked industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics” are heavy contributors to the global problem of antibiotic resistance. Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial

Grist
by Eliot Coleman

Organic farming is often falsely represented as being unscientific. However, despite the popular assumption that it sprang full born from the delusions of 60s hippies, it has a more extensive, and scientifically respectable, provenance. If you look back at the first flush of notoriety in the 1940s, the names most often mentioned, Sir Albert Howard and J. I. Rodale, rather than being the initiators, were actually just popularizers of a groundswell of ideas that had begun to develop some 50 years earlier in the 1890s.

A growing coterie of farmers, landlords, scientists, and rural philosophers in both England and Germany had begun questioning the wisdom of the chemically based agriculture that had grown so prominent from its tiny beginning in the 1840s. Advances in biological sciences during the late 19th century, such as those that explained the workings of nitrogen fixation, mycorrhizal association, and soil microbial life supported their case. Those new sciences set the stage for a deeper understanding of natural processes, and offered inspiration as to how a modern biologically based agriculture might be formulated. Read Full Article »

Posted in Media/News

The New York Times
By CARL ZIMMER

Correction Appended

In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.

Blood type, meet bug type. Read Full Article »

Posted in Media/News