Most Recent Campaign Headlines
Nestlé USA Lawsuit Highlights Confusion Over Non-GMO Claims, Say Attorneys.
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.
There it sits – in all its green glory – in the produce section of your local grocery store. Broccoli. One of the most nutritious vegetables on the planet. But 70 years ago, it contained twice the calcium on average and more than five times the amount of Vitamin A.
Toxic algae is spreading through the coastal waters of South Florida, causing what is known as a “red tide” to form, and it is killing wildlife at alarming rates due to lack of oxygen. The explosion of wildlife-killing algae in the area is largely a result of agricultural run-off linked to the Big Sugar industry.
If you’ve perused the new 50-State Food System Scorecard from the Union of Concerned Scientists, you’ve probably noticed a seeming contradiction. As shown on the map within this article, the heavily agricultural states in the middle of the country aren’t exactly knocking it out of the park when it comes to the overall health and sustainability of their food and farming systems.
Let’s say all the meat — the combined poultry, beef, and pork — is ground down into patties. Let’s also assume, for simplicity (and because we’re not interested in preparing a meat mélange burger for ourselves), that those patties have the same density as an uncooked quarter-pound beef burger.
Fish are an important part of the ecosystem and the human diet. Unfortunately, overfishing has depleted many fish stocks, and the proposed solution — fish farming — is creating far more problems than it solves. Not only are fish farms polluting the aquatic environment and spreading disease to wild fish, farmed fish are also an inferior food source.
Paramilitaries, government troops, hired gangsters and smugglers killed 207 people trying to protect the environment from the spread of businesses like cattle ranches and sugarcane plantations in 2017, according to a new report by international NGO Global Witness. That’s approximately four environmental defenders killed every week of the year.
The Trump administration is resisting the World Health Organization’s effort to sharply limit antibiotic use in farm animals, a move intended to help preserve the drugs’ effectiveness. Instead, the U.S. is helping draft an alternative approach that appears more favorable to agribusiness.
In 2002, Robertson began working as a part-time poultry inspector at a turkey processing plant in Moroni, a 20-minute drive from her home. It was a good job in a place where steady employment was hard to come by, she thought at the time.
- Page 1
- ››
Scientific Studies
Get Local
Cool the planet.
Feed the world.