These charges raise serious questions about whether prosecutors are attempting to unconstitutionally punish the activists for filming, documenting, and exposing abuses by the agricultural industry that dominates the state, and particularly whether the prosecutors have acted with improper motives because of their own extensive ties to that industry.
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The growing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics causes some 23,000 American deaths a year and $34 billion in financial losses annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The C.D.C. also estimates that more than 400,000 United States residents become ill with infections caused by antibiotic-resistant food-borne bacteria every year, with about one in five resistant infections caused by germs from food and animals.
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Women who eat more fast food spend longer trying to get pregnant, while those who eat more fruit conceive more quickly, researchers in Australia reported Thursday. It’s one more finding adding to evidence that a healthy diet can help make people more fertile.
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B.C. has given the go-ahead for Cermaq Canada to use up to 2.3 million litres of a pesticide called Paramove 50 to remove sea lice from fish at 14 salmon farms in Clayoquot Sound, but opponents fear the mixture of hydrogen peroxide, surfactants and other chemicals will harm other species and weaken the immune system of farmed fish, making them more likely to contract diseases that could infect wild fish.
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Scott Pruitt, the embattled head of the Environmental Protection Agency, took the side of poultry companies and other businesses in Arkansas in a dispute over the pollution of an ecologically sensitive and economically vital watershed, environmental groups say. While he was representing Oklahoma as its attorney general, Pruitt helped to slow the implementation of a plan, forged years ago by both states, to clean a river in his home state.
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What if there were one solution that could fix a lot of the world’s problems?
That’s how organic farmer Ben Dobson began his TEDxHudson talk a few years ago. “Appropriate organic farming techniques and properly planned grazing can reverse climate change,” Dobson told his audience.
Dobson has been a farmer his entire life. But it wasn’t until six years ago that he made the connection
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Virtually all trends, biophysical and socioeconomic, suggest that levels of hunger, already high, will only increase as the human population grows and its life-support systems are degraded. Steps that might ameliorate the situation are, unhappily, nowhere in sight.
Is it likely humanity will satisfactorily feed 11 billion people around the end of this century? A quick response would be "of course not—after 60 years of assurances that the food problem would be solved, we're not feeding 7.5 billion today."
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Clearly Ronnie Cummins, international director of Organic Consumers Association, is not alone in thinking that “It’s time to step up the attack on factory farms and the entire degenerative food and farming system.”
Two new allies waging war against Big Ag include a small family farm in Minnesota and residents of a rural Delaware community.
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On Thursday, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway introduced a draft Farm Bill that runs counter to what farmers and eaters across the country need. Among other disappointments, the bill would eliminate the country's largest conservation program, allow concentrated animal feeding operations to claim limited conservation dollars, place no meaningful limitations on subsidy payments to large farms, and remove all mandatory funding for Energy Title programs.
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Ever wonder if the eggs you eat are really organic? According to a recent PBS NewsHour segment, the answer to that question is: “It depends on who you ask.”
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