Katherine's Blog
You depend on your local farmers for the healthy food you buy at your community’s natural food store and farmers’ market.
Unfortunately, many small family farms struggle to succeed financially. That’s because farm policies favor big farms and multinational agribusiness corporations, not your local farmers.
It’s time to change that. And the best way to do it is to unite farmers from all over the country around efforts to rewrite U.S. food and farming policies.
It’s easy to forget that before there was a National Organic Program, before there was organic certification, before there were genetically engineered crops and industrial factory farms, there were farmers—farmers who grew nutritious food and raised healthy meat, using farming and ranching practices that worked with, and enhanced, the Earth’s natural ecosystems.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Organic Program evolved out of the need to define “organic” in order to protect these good farmers in a marketplace increasingly being taken over by industrial food producers. Unfortunately, over the years, industrial food lobbyists have used their financial and political clout to try their best to weaken organic standards.
The Impossible Burger—deceptively marketed as “natural”—already contains a genetically engineered ingredient, a yeast referred to as “heme.”
Now, Impossible Foods, the maker of the fake meat patty, is adding a new GE ingredient: genetically engineered soy.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown: GMO Soy is bad for consumers, bad for the planet!
Could the dismal state of the U.S. food & farming system finally be getting the attention it deserves? From high-profile politicians?
In the last two months, as they hit the campaign trail, two presidential candidates—Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—have floated proposals to take on Big Agribusiness and start rallying support for America’s small family farmers.
If we let Sens. Warren and Sanders know that we approve, maybe other presidential candidates will start talking about food & farming.
U.S. food, farming, environmental and climate policies are working just fine for giant corporations and their shareholders.
But these policies aren’t working for family farmers. And they sure as heck aren’t working for you.
Change won’t come from the top. It will have to come from people like you. The best place to start? In your own community, by building support for a Green New Deal (GND).
Can you attend or host a Green New Deal Town Hall in your community? Or if you live in one of these cities, can you participate in the Green New Deal Tour?
While much of the nation was tuned into the Michael Cohen drama in Washington, D.C. this week, another drama was playing out in a San Francisco courtroom.
On February 25, a jury in San Francisco Federal Court began hearing the case of Edwin Hardeman vs. Monsanto. Hardeman alleges that Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma cancer.
Hardeman’s is the second case involving someone who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma after using Roundup. His case follows the August 10, 2018, $289-million judgment (later reduced to $78 million) awarded to DeWayne “Lee” Johnson, a former school groundskeeper who also sued Monsanto for causing his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Monsanto’s appeal of the $78-million judgment is still pending.
There are more than 9,000 claims pending against Monsanto in state courts, about 620 awaiting trial in federal court. Reuters reported in November that Hardeman’s case was selected as “a so-called bellwether, or test trial, frequently used in U.S. product liability mass litigation to help both sides gauge the range of damages and define settlement options.”
For four years, Milkhouse Dairy Farm and Creamery in Monmouth, Maine, supplied grass-fed organic milk to Horizon.
That was until Horizon told the farm’s owners, Caitlin Frame and Andy Smith, their contract would end in six months. Horizon said it was because Milkhouse was selling some of its milk direct to consumers and retail stores, and also using some of it to make and sell yogurt.
Horizon (owned by international food conglomerate, Danone) said it didn’t like that the farm was “diverting” some of its supply, instead of selling exclusively to Horizon.
Chlorpyrifos, manufactured by DowDuPont, is a neurotoxic organophosphate pesticide that’s been linked to severe birth defects, brain damage and mental disorders in children.
Yet despite these known risks, and despite new evidence suggesting that Dow knew for decades how toxic chlorpyrifos is to children, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) still allows chlorpyrifos to be sprayed on more than 50 fruits, vegetables and nuts, including strawberries, almonds, oranges, broccoli and apples.
If the EPA won’t do its job, it’s time for Congress to act.
In a few weeks, Monsanto will go on trial again. And when it does, the pesticide-maker won’t be able to suppress evidence that the company ghostwrote scientific studies and otherwise tried to influence scientists and regulators in an attempt to hide the potential health risks of its flagship product, Roundup weedkiller.
This week, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, the federal judge in San Francisco overseeing 620 cases involving Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller and cancer victims, ruled that the evidence could be introduced in the upcoming trial. According to a Reuters report, Chhabria said the documents were “super relevant.”
Chhabria’s ruling almost guarantees that the documents in question will play a role when, on February 25, a jury in San Francisco Federal Court, begins hearing the case of Edwin Hardeman vs. Monsanto. Hardeman alleges that Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma cancer.
Dewayne Johnson never wanted to be a celebrity acting out his life on an international stage. He’d much rather be a healthy man, going to work, taking care of his family, making a modest-but-steady living.
In a recent interview with Time magazine, the former school groundskeeper said:
“I’ve never really been a fan of attention or fanfare. And now it seems like that’s taken over my life. I get requests for media interviews from all over the world, and people ask me to come to their events and speak, and I’ve had people telling me they want to buy my 'life rights' to try to get movie deals . . . It’s crazy.”
Crazy, maybe. But Johnson, who recently won a $289-million judgment (later reduced to $78 million) against Monsanto (now Bayer) for manufacturing a product he says (and the jury agreed) caused his terminal cancer—and hiding evidence of that product’s lethal toxicity—has perhaps done more than any one single person to shine a spotlight on how bad Roundup weedkiller is. And how deceitful Monsanto is.
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