Honey Colony by Brett Barth, Buzzworthy Blogs Credit: NRCS The steady creep of prices at your grocery checkout might have you wondering about frosts and droughts and the many other challenges confronting agribusiness. That’s kind of you, really, but stop. Truth be told, these are roaring times in the U.S. Farming industry. According to a recent report… Read more »
Why Congress Should Care About the Beepocalypse
Roll Call by Rep. John Conyers Jr. and Michael Shank Credit: Devcore This year, food security is set to suffer another big setback, and the culprit could not be cuter: honeybees. Last winter, America’s beekeeping industry lost nearly half of all its bee colonies. And the numbers keep falling. Last summer, in the largest bee… Read more »
Hydroponic’s Organic Label is All Wet
Washington Post By Barbara Damrosch Hydroponic gardening could not be more different from organic gardening if it tried. Maybe you’ve seen a hydroponic greenhouse operation, or a home gardener’s kit, in which plant roots are bathed in a solution of chemical fertilizers but never come into contact with any soil. It is a clever and… Read more »
Abundance Doesn’t Mean Health
The New York Times by Mark Bittman The relatively new notion that around a third or more of the world’s population is badly (“mal”) nourished conflates hunger and diet-spawned illnesses like diabetes, both of which are preventable. Both result from a lack of access to quality food, which in turn can result from a lack… Read more »
Crop Flops: GMOs Lead Ag Down the Wrong Path
Grist by Tom Philpott Before I respond to Nathanael Johnson’s assertion that the “stakes are so low” in the debate over GMOs, I want to address a smaller point. “The debate isn’t about actual genetically modified organisms — if it was we’d be debating the individual plants, not GMOs as a whole,” Johnson writes. That’s a good… Read more »
Action Needed NOW on Organic Certification Cost Share in the Farm Bill
National Organic Coalition National Organic Certification Cost Share (NOCCS) is a top item for Farm Bill Conference. The House Bill repeals Certification Cost Share and the Senate Bill fully funds the program. If you live or work in any of the States/Districts listed below, please call your conference member (see below) and ask them to: … Read more »
The F.D.A.’s Not-Really-Such-Good-News
New York Times By Mark Bittman That “good” news you may have read last week about the Food and Drug Administration’s curbing antibiotics in animal feed may not be so good after all. In fact, it appears that the F.D.A. has once again refused to do all it could to protect public health. For those… Read more »
Perspective: Preserving Antibiotics, Rationally
New England Journal of Medicine By Aidan Hollis, Ph.D., and Ziana Ahmed, B.A.Sc. Antimicrobial resistance is a critical threat to public health. The value of antibiotics for human health is immeasurable, but were one to try to measure, a plausible estimate of the increase in life expectancy attributable to antibiotics might be 2 to 10… Read more »
Agroecology Should be at the Core of USDA’s Mission
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Dr. M. Jahi Chappell The comment period recently closed on the USDA’s Research, Education, and Economics (REE) Action Plan Draft, which responded to informal and formal consultations with internal and external advisors and stakeholders, and “lessons learned from implementation of Farm Bill provisions.” It refines the initial REE Action… Read more »
WhiteWave Consumes Organic Salad-Greens Distributor Earthbound
Massive corporate consolidation continues in the organic sector (Commentary by the Cornucopia Institute’s Mark Kastel) WhiteWave CEO, and former Dean Foods CEO, Gregg Engles knows as much about vegetables as he knew about dairy when he orchestrated a global feeding frenzy in that market to build Dean Foods. The end result was the destruction of… Read more »
