[NOTE: Antibiotics are not allowed in the production of organic food] NPR – The Salt by Dan Charles Source: UGA College of Ag and Environmental Sciences If you go by their declarations and promises, meat producers are drastically cutting back on the use of antibiotics to treat their poultry, pigs and cattle. Over the past… Read more »
The Truth About Pet Food
[This article was previously published in the winter issue of The Cultivator, Cornucopia’s quarterly newsletter.] by Rachel Zegerius, Communications and Development Assistant at The Cornucopia Institute The author of the pet food report is Cornucopia staff scientist Linley Dixon, Ph.D. New Report Helps You Choose the Best Brands for Your Four-legged Friends Source: Dollar Photo Club Did… Read more »
Scrambled Eggs: Report Contrasts Widespread Industry Fraud and USDA Complacency with True Heroes in Organics
Family Farmers Face Unfair Competition from “Organic” Factory Farms Just as Americans are reacting to new medical literature encouraging the consumption of “healthy” fats, including eggs, an independent report has been released that focuses on widespread abuses in organic egg production and marketing, primarily by large industrial agribusinesses. The study, conducted by The Cornucopia Institute,… Read more »
Yes, Bananas May Really Be Going Extinct
Inquisitr by Andrew Galbreath Source: USDA, Lance Cheung The most popular fruit in the world may be in serious danger of extinction. A virulent and incurable strain of the plant-destroying fungus Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense is spreading across the globe and ravaging banana crops in its wake. A study by researchers in the Netherlands appearing… Read more »
A Secret Weapon to Fight Climate Change: Dirt
The Washington Post by Debbie Barker and Michael Pollan Cover crops in small grain stubble Source: NRCS, South Dakota Debbie Barker is the international programs director at the Center for Food Safety. Michael Pollan is the John S. and James L. Knight professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. When Will Allen is asked… Read more »
Farm to Fork: Uncovering Hazards in Our Food Systems
Reveal News from The Center for Investigative Reporting In December, Reveal will dedicate an hour to stories about food, looking at the complicated networks of labor, trade and regulation that carry meat, produce and other products to our tables. We’ll upend your ideas about what kind of chicken is most susceptible to salmonella, unveil the secret… Read more »
A Brief History of the Modern Strawberry
YouTube by Reveal From cereal to ice cream to cocktails, it seems that strawberries are served with just about everything. But it wasn’t always this way. Today, Americans eat four times as many strawberries as they did 40 years ago. This short stop-motion animation explains how clever advertising tactics and certain pesticides helped make the… Read more »
Weaker Breaths in Kids Linked to Early Pesticide Exposure
Science Daily by Sarah Yang Source: Robert Patton Taking a deep breath might be a bit harder for children exposed early in life to a widely used class of pesticides in agriculture, according to a new paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. A new study has linked the levels of organophosphate pesticide… Read more »
Carbon Farming Gets A Nod At Paris Climate Conference
The Salt – NPR by Alastair Bland Source: NRCS This week, world leaders are hashing out a binding agreement in Paris at the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. And for the first time, they’ve made the capture of carbon in soil a formal part of the global response to the… Read more »
The Lynchpin of Industrial Ag
Pesticide Action Network – North America Source: Pieter van Marion Pesticides are the lynchpin of an unsustainable industrial agriculture system. Sixty years ago, after World War II, we started industrializing U.S. farming operations through a mix of policy decisions and accidents of history. This method of farming is neither inevitable nor efficient. More to the… Read more »
