Organic Bytes
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Computer Time
TECH UPDATE

We’ve Launched!

It was a long time coming. But this week, we launched our new website. We hope you like it as much as we do.

We hope you’ll agree that the new-and-improved site is easier to navigate. It’s certainly less likely to crash than the old one, which had been cobbled together over the past decade or so, using a combination of platforms some of you may be too young to have ever heard of. (Can you say Artman? And Dreamweaver)? 

Over time, we hope to add more personal blog posts, and provide perspective and context around new trends and breaking news. So please keep checking back.

In the meantime, our website is your website. Come on in!

Check out our new website!


Geoff Lawton: From Prairie to Monoculture
VIDEO OF THE WEEK

This Is Not Farming. This Is Insanity.

Geoff Lawton has taught more than 6,000 students in over 30 countries how to grow food in the most efficient and ecologically friendly way possible, through permaculture design science.

He knows as well as anyone what a healthy ecosystem populated by healthy plants should look like. And what it shouldn’t look like—a plant factory where there’s no life at all.

Watch the video


Farmers Veggies Happy Flowers Via Organica
ACTION ALERT

Deadline December 15

Farmers know all about clearing and leveling out fields in order to plant crops. But the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) seems determined to keep the playing field for small farmers decidedly unlevel.

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which is geared toward applying one-size-fits-all regulations to farms, regardless of how large or small those farms are, would impose unrealistic burdens on many small local farmers.

In response to complaints about the FSMA, Congress told the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to implement the Tester-Hagan amendment, which would exempt small-scale, direct-marketing farms and artisan food producers from the most burdensome aspects of the FSMA.

But now the FDA wants to implement the amendment in a way that will allow the agency to target small farms and food producers one-by-one and put them out of business—with little or no recourse for the farmers.

If we don’t intervene, the FDA could put countless small farmers out of business. 

DEADLINE DECEMBER 15. TAKE ACTION: Tell FDA food safety regulators to be fair to small farmers!

If you are a farmer or food producer, please submit your own comments detailing the ways FSMA impacts you.

 


Yes on 92
OREGON UPDATE

Uncounted Votes Sink Measure 92

Technically, we lost. By about 800 votes. A fraction of a percentage point.

But we’ll never really know. Because this week, a judge in Oregon ruled against a lawsuit filed this week by our YES on 92 Campaign. The suit would have required the state to count the 4600 votes that election officials threw out—because they said the signatures on the ballot envelopes didn’t match the signatures on the voters’ registration cards.

Monsanto and Big Food will claim victory. 

What they won’t say is that it took a record-breaking $20.7 million of advertising, intended to misinform and confuse voters, for them to buy this “victory.”

On the very day the judge denied voters in Oregon the right to have their votes counted, the pesticide and junk food makers were buying up seats on Capitol Hill, to make the case that no state should be allowed to pass a law requiring mandatory labeling of GMOs.

They are doing everything in their power to hide the truth about the toxic food they are producing, and the poisons they are unleashing into our environment.

Just as we will continue to do everything in our power to expose their dirty, toxic secrets.

The fact is, they are losing. Vermont has passed a solid, enforceable GMO labeling law. Sales of organics continue to outpace sales of their GMO junk food. Companies like Coca-Cola and General Mills are struggling. Last week Hershey's announced it will remove genetically engineered high fructose corn syrup from its brand-name products. The United Nations has declared that small farmers, not Monsanto, will feed the world.

Thank you to everyone who helped fight this battle in Oregon. Let the boycotts of those companies that continue to fund anti-labeling, pro-GMO campaigns, continue!

Read the official campaign statement 

Read the lawsuit

More here


Smile OCA
SUPPORT THE OCA & OCF

What a Week!

While lots of great, hard-working organizations are winding down for the year, maybe even having holiday parties, we’ve been cranking up.

OCA has so far contributed about $850,000 (not counting staff time) to Oregon’s Measure 92, an initiative to label GMOs, and another $50,000 to help Proposition 105 in Colorado. And then there were the contributions we made to help win GMO crop bans in several Oregon counties, and Humboldt County in California.

Yesterday, we finally had to concede in Oregon–because the Secretary of State refused to count 4600 ballots, claiming the signatures on the envelopes didn't match the signatures on the voters' registration cards. The campaign alone was costly, because we were up against $20.7 million in spending by the opposition. Then there was the recount. And the lawsuit filed in an attempt to get those 4600 votes counted.

With the Oregon campaign in overtime, we also felt it was critical to take a stand against a federal bill that would wipe out every state's right to pass GMO labeling laws. So we dedicated ourselves these past few weeks to organizing a major rally in Washington D.C., to protest H.R. 4432.

We pulled that off on Wednesday, after coordinating among more than two dozen organizations that volunteered to help out, and organizing buses from about a dozen states. It had to be done. We could not sit by while lawmakers, bought and paid for by Monsanto, pass egregiously anti-consumer, anti-Democracy laws.

The unexpected recount and lawsuit in Oregon, and the last-minute demonstration on Capitol Hill, have put a dent in our year-end budget. We greatly appreciate your generous donations to support this past month of work that is so critical to the rights of consumers everywhere.

Donate to help fund our December 10 rally against Pompeo’s bill to kill GMO labeling.

Donate to help offset the cost of the Oregon Measure 92 recount and lawsuit

 


Rooster Eye
ACTION ALERT

Blurred Lines, Dangerous Loopholes

The results of a new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts confirms what consumers and some lawmakers suspected all along—the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) “voluntary” plan to let the factory farm industry police itself on the overuse of antibiotics is not only outrageous, but extremely dangerous.

The Pew study analyzed the 287 drugs covered under the FDA’s Guidance #213, which says that veterinarians should prescribe, and factory farms should use, antibiotics exclusively for disease prevention, not to fatten up the animals. The study found that nearly one fourth of the 287 drugs can be used for both.

That makes for a lot of blurred lines. Which matters. A lot. Because 29 of the 66 antibiotics in that area of overlap, including tetracyclines and penicillin, are listed by the FDA as “critically important” to human health. And 37 are listed as “highly important.”

Dr. Gail Hansen, veterinarian and senior officer with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ human health and industrial farming project, had this to say about the FDA’s guidance: 

“Even if Guidance #213 is fully implemented, we are concerned that dozens of products could still be added to animal feed or water throughout the animals’ lives in the absence of any threat from a specific bacterial disease.” 

TAKE ACTION: Tell the FDA: We Need a Mandatory Ban on Sub-Therapeutic Doses of Antibiotics for Livestock—not Weak, Voluntary

More here

Read Lawmakers’ Letter to FDA


Stop Monsanto
MILLIONS AGAINST MONSANTO

Grassroots Greatness, Political Posturing

From the minute the first bus arrived outside Washington D.C.’s Rayburn Building, and 50 sleep-deprived but enthusiastic activists spilled out onto the sidewalk, it was clear. This would be a day of grassroots greatness. 

Outdoors, at least.

Indoors? It fast became equally clear that this would be another day of business-as-usual on Capitol Hill, of corporations running the show with the help of their hired-gun politicians.

By the end of the day we knew this: The road toward ending the corporate corruption of our food system—and of our Democracy—will be a long one. And we will need millions of indefatigable people to walk with us.

On Wednesday, December 10, about 600 farmers, consumers and citizens of all stripes traveled—many of them overnight on crowded buses—to Washington D.C. to voice their opposition to a federal bill that would, among other things, strip states of their right to pass GMO labeling laws. 

Corporate money kept us from getting all but a few people in to the hearing on H.R. 4432.

But nothing kept us from rallying on Capitol Hill. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Read about the December 10 rally and hearing

Watch the full hearing on H.R. 4432

Listen to Rep. Pingree speak at our rally

Watch Jonathan Emord speak at our rally


BLOG OF THE WEEK

And Then There Were Three

In the latest example of how consumers can pressure food companies to do the right thing, on Friday (December 5, 2014), Stonyfield Farm, a New Hampshire-based producer of organic milk and yogurt, resigned from the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA). IDFA is a trade group that is suing Vermont to overturn the state’s GMO labeling law, passed earlier this year. 

The resignation came about five months after OCA and a number of our allies sent an open letter to four leading organic dairy companies, demanding that they withdraw their membership in the IDFA. 

So far, only Stonyfield has dumped its membership. (California-based Clover Stornetta Farms quit the IDFA in July, after our letter was published, though the company wasn’t targeted in the letter).

Organic Valley, White Wave/Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic Dairy continue to support the IDFA, which not only is suing Vermont, but also is lobbying for H.R. 4432, an outrageous anti-consumer bill, introduced in April (2014) in the House of Representatives by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.). The bill, dubbed by consumers as the Deny Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act, would preempt all state GMO labeling laws, and make it legal to use the word “natural” on products that contain GMOs.

The IDFA says it’s “sad” that Stonyfield resigned, but that it hasn’t heard much opposition to its anti-consumer lobbying from its other 200 members.

So how about it, Organic Valley, Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic? Isn’t it about time the IDFA heard from you—that if they don’t support consumers’ right to know, you won’t support them?

Read the essay