As many of you are well aware the newspaper industry is in crisis. And agricultural journalism is no exception. A great number of reporters we work with around the country have left the profession over the last couple of years. Falling ad revenues, based on the meltdown of the economy and stiff competition from alternatives like the Internet, have led to mass layoffs at some of the flagship papers around the country. This is a real blow to democracy where we can only exercise our franchise, as citizens, if we truly know what's going on. Just as Cornucopia is an organic industry, watchdog journalists are the ultimate watchdogs in this society. We can only exert pressure in our industry if both farmers and consumers know what's going on.

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Bangor Daily News By BDN Staff Although major food buyers, including national chain restaurants, have stopped buying meat from farms where antibiotics are routinely used or asked such farms to reduce their use, the routine administration of these drugs remains too widespread. Rather than leaving it up to individual companies, Congress should adopt a national policy to limit antibiotic use. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that as much as 70 percent of antibiotics used annually on livestock is not for medical treatment. Instead, the drugs are used to promote growth and to combat the effects of cramped, dirty conditions at some farms. The problem is that such routine use of antibiotics in animals can lead to the natural development and spread of drug-resistant bacteria, which can harm humans and animals.

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TESTIMONY OF TOM WILLEY, OWNER, T & D WILLEY FARMS, Madera, California at the hearing on the proposed National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, Monterey, California. My wife and I own and operate a 75-acre, certified organic truck farm just outside of Madera in the central San Joaquin Valley. We grow over fifty vegetable crops, including many in the leafy green category, farming the year round to supply West Coast specialty retailers, restaurants and our own local subscriber network of 800 families who are members of T & D Willey Farms CSA. I’ve spent most of our farm’s near 30-year history pursuing the knowledge and art of biologically intensive soil management in an effort to gain a reputation for the most tasteful and nutritious produce in the marketplace. I am proud to boast a handful of my soil harbors nearly six billion living microbial organisms of vast diversity, equal to the number of human beings inhabiting earth, which generously power the fertility cycle upon which we all depend for our very lives. Eschewing toxic inputs while relying only on biological processes to grow high quality, high yield vegetable crops is a stimulating intellectual and scientific challenge for which I and my customers have been well rewarded. I’m afraid some significant problems in food safety and misguided approaches to their solution, like NLGMA, could derail achievements in biological agriculture and a greater promise of food made safe through respect for and cooperation with the microbial community which owns and operates this planet upon which we are merely guests.

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Huffington Post Tim LaSalle CEO of the Rodale Institute. The compelling humanitarian goals expressed today at the corporately sponsored Global Harvest Initiative symposium were laudable, as were some of the hunger-relief projects cited. Missing, however, was an honest assessment of the limits of dead-end chemical agriculture to play a leading role in actually feeding people. Also absent from the high-powered forum was a prominent role for what organic agriculture is already doing to meet the most important goals on the food-hunger-nutrition side of the problem. The event, despite all the good people presenting and all the calls for curbing the environmental harm of chemical ag, amounted to glitzy green packaging for the same unnecessary gift of chemical dependence for the world's farmers. GHI is sponsored by ADM, DuPont, John Deere and Monsanto. (Yes, the same Monsanto which has promised to double its profits by 2012 with continuing introductions of "high impact technology" seeds.)

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New York Times Op-Ed Contributor By MICHAEL POLLAN Berkeley, Calif. -- To listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself -- perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed. No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet. That's why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

Posted in Opinion/Editorial