OCA's Blog
Today is World Food Day.
It’s also a day when millions of people are cleaning up after yet another weather-related disaster, this time in Florida. And millions more around the globe are experiencing devastating droughts and crippling storms that are leaving them unable to grow food and feed their families.
We often think that we, as individuals, have little or no power to solve problems as complex and overwhelming as global warming and world hunger.
And yet, we do. The personal choices we make when it comes to our food, and the demands we make of our local, state and federal politicians to adopt climate change-reversing food, farming and and land-use policies give us the power to do something, everyday, to reverse our dangerous course.
Regeneration International and Kiss the Ground have teamed up to create a video series they call “Trails of Regeneration.” Their latest segment takes you to Normandy, France, for a closer look at a farm that has been highly successful over the last 12 years: Farm du Bec Hellouin.
By what yardstick do farmers Charles and Perrine Hervé-Gruyer measure the success of their farm business? For starters: yield.
Using regenerative practices, the husband-and-wife team says they can grow as much food on one-tenth of a hectare (one hectare equals about 2.3 acres) of land as neighboring farms grow on only one hectare of land! How? The organic farm, based on the principles of permaculture, uses mound cultivation, agroforestry, associated crops, animal traction, fragmented ramal wood, effective microorganisms, terra preta and more.
States are allowed to write their own laws governing the sale of raw milk. But thanks to a 1987 ordinance passed by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), all milk sold across state lines, even between two states where raw milk sales are legal, must be pasteurized.
We think that’s wrong. So, on September 26, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) will join our allies at the Real Food Consumer Coalition, the Organic and Natural Health Association and the American Grassfed Association to bring the truth about raw milk to Congress.
If you believe carbon farming is a big part of the solution to climate change, then you need to learn more about The Environmental Cowboy and his new film “A Dry Hope.”
Khory Hancock, an Australian environmental scientist, climate change solutions strategist and documentarian who is best known as The Environmental Cowboy, recently went on a journey through New South Wales to see firsthand the impacts of what is being called the worst drought in more than 400 years.
It’s been nearly two weeks since the historic verdict in the Monsanto trial and the news is still buzzing.
On Friday, Aug. 10, a jury in San Francisco ruled that the world’s most widely used herbicide—Monsanto’s Roundup—caused Dewayne “Lee” Johnson’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The jury found in favor of Mr. Johnson on all 16 questions the court asked them to answer.
This week, the FDA acknowledged it is investigating whether a nearby massive concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), or factory farm, could be the source of E. coli contamination of romaine lettuce earlier this year. The tainted lettuce resulted in hundreds of illnesses in 36 states and resulted in five deaths.
According to Food & Water Watch’s Factory Farm Map, an analysis of USDA data on factory farms, the density of cattle feedlots in the region where the tainted lettuce was grown is extreme. In Yuma county in 2012, cattle feedlots had an estimated average of over 67,000 head of cattle per facility. In the region implicated in the outbreak, samples of nearby irrigation canal water tested positive for the same strain of E. coli that caused the outbreak. The canal is close to a CAFO that can hold in excess of 100,000 head of cattle at any one time.
You may have seen a story this week detailing how Facebook shut down a series of accounts. As noted by Politico, Facebook claimed these accounts “sought to inflame social and political tensions in the United States, and said their activity was similar — and in some cases connected — to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.”
Similar? What does “similar” mean?
The death-pit for civil liberties is usually found in a combination of fringe/unpopular people or ideas and a national security emergency.
Warning of a possible domino effect as multiple climate feedback loops are triggered within a dynamic cascade of rising temperatures and warming oceans, scientists behind a frightening new study say that for the sake of humanity's future they hope scenarios explored in their new models do not come to pass.
"I do hope we are wrong, but as scientists we have a responsibility to explore whether this is real," Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where the research was done, told the Guardian. "We need to know now. It's so urgent. This is one of the most existential questions in science."
"Instead of putting American families first, the Trump administration is once again doing the bidding of corporations and their lobbyists."
President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Transportation Department on Wednesday formally unveiled their long-anticipated plan to gut Obama-era fuel efficiency standards, a regulatory rollback environmentalists quickly denounced as "a disastrous wreck for consumers and the planet."
The New York State Assembly has put forth a bill than bans BPA substitution chemicals in children's products. The bill, which has been referred to the state's Department of Environmental Conservation, would expand existing legislation that prohibits the sale of child care products that contain bisphenol-A.
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