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Should Vermont keep throwing money at cleaning up the state’s polluted waterways—without providing funding for preventing future pollution?
Vermont’s Clean Water Board is taking public comments through September 6, on the board’s priorities for funding the cleanup of Vermont’s waterways.
You can submit comments in writing here.
Better yet, deliver your comments in person at the board’s public hearing, 10 a.m. Thursday, August 22, at the National Life Building, Winooski Room, in Montpelier.
The organic industry just received another harsh reminder — unless we truly deal with our problems, the integrity of the organic seal will only suffer further damage. With The Washington Post’s investigation of Aurora Dairy in the rearview mirror — and largely ignored by the USDA— the dairy scandal that we are now facing is Natural Prairie Dairy, a 14,000-head organic dairy in Texas.
In Michigan, food testing has lagged significantly behind drinking water testing despite confirmation that surface water and animal feed from at least two farms are impacted by PFAS contamination. Regulators decided not to test an Allegan County dairy farm because they worried of repercussions seen in other states.
Unless we stop allowing factory farms to routinely feed medically important antibiotics to animals, for “preventive” reasons, we’ll see a continued increase in foodborne illnesses that can’t be treated by one or more antibiotics.
That's what the World Health Organization WHO) says in its latest report. And yet the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) refuses to act.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress: Healthy farm animals shouldn’t get antibiotics that sick people need!
By 2050, 10 million people could die from drug-resistant diseases every year—that’s more than the number of people who die from cancer each year.
By just 2030, antimicrobial-resistance could force up to 24 million people into extreme poverty, and trigger a global economic crisis on a scale comparable to the one last seen in 2008-2009.
What’s the biggest driver of this global public health crisis? The reckless use of antibiotics on factory farms.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress: Healthy farm animals shouldn’t get antibiotics that sick people need!
There is no clock in the milking parlor at Vorsteveld Farm. There are no windows, either, but a couple of hours into my first shift, I stopped wondering what was happening outside. The parlor is like a casino, a cocooned vault where the light is always fluorescent and the time is only now.
There's no point in knowing what month it is or what the weather will be tomorrow, because every day is exactly the same: The ladies come in to be milked 25 at a time, arranging themselves in the stalls according to a mysterious but inviolable pecking order.
A federal judge has ruled against Ben & Jerry’s and allowed a lawsuit alleging that the company doesn’t live up to its environmentally friendly messaging to move forward.
The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) filed suit in Washington in July arguing that the Vermont-based ice cream maker misled consumers to think its product is more environmental friendly than it really is, in violation of consumer protection laws. On Monday, Judge Neal Kravitz foiled Ben & Jerry’s efforts to get the case dismissed.
Organic Consumers Association (OCA) today announced that the District of Columbia Superior Court rejected Ben & Jerry’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit OCA brought against the Unilever-owned brand in July 2018 under the District of Columbia Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA).
“We are pleased that the court agrees that Ben & Jerry’s can be held accountable for the claims it makes about its products, and how the production of those products impacts animal welfare and the environment,” said Ronnie Cummins, OCA’s international director. “This is a major victory for millions of consumers who have been deceived by Ben & Jerry’s marketing claims.”
Despite calls from health professionals worldwide to curb the use of farm-animal antibiotics, Vermont’s conventional dairy industry — dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – continues to use the antimicrobial drugs extensively, including non-therapeutic uses to prevent diseases caused by the animal confinement and concentration. After numerous records requests and analysis, including eight years of antibiotic violation data obtained from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, we found a rising trend with on-farm antibiotic violations, a lax regulatory environment, and no plan – or even goal – to address the problem.
Vermont’s nonorganic dairy industry is all but ignoring the dire warnings from the World Health Organization to reduce overall antibiotic use in food production, a leading cause of antibiotic resistance, which makes the drugs less effective when necessary to combat human illnesses. While the WHO has called for a complete halt to using antibiotics as a prophylactic in food production– preventing rather than treating animal diseases — Vermont’s dairy industry, with the support of VAAFM regulators, continues to allow healthy cows to be routinely treated between lactations.
The world’s largest meat packer, JBS Tolleson, is recalling nearly 7 million pounds of beef after an investigation identified JBS as the common supplier of ground beef products sold to people who developed Salmonella Newport, a disease that causes fever and diarrhea, weakness, dyspnea and, potentially, sudden death.
As of October 4, 57 people in 16 states had been sickened by JBS beef.
If that’s not enough to make you swear off industrial factory farm beef, here’s more food for thought: There’s a good chance the JBS beef was contaminated because it contained a combination of cattle raised for beef, and dairy cows sent off for slaughter because they were too sick to produce milk.
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