Farm Issues
Farm Bill: Healthy Food, not Corporate Welfare!
Unless you are a diehard policy wonk, it's tough to get excited about the Farm Bill. But consumers have a bigger stake in this mammoth piece of federal legislation than we may realize. Big Ag's lobbyists fight hard to protect corporate interests, almost always at the expense of consumers. The OCA is here to help you fight for for healthy food and against corporate welfare!
-
apples-2698-OCA.jpg
Apples· steve urow© 2014 -
peas-4784-OCA.jpg
steve urow's garden not· steve urow© 2014
Carlton Sanders started a job he truly loved—raising chickens—in 1991 in Forest, Mississippi. In 2001, the small company he sold his chickens to was bought by agribusiness giant Koch Foods, and everything changed. “They treated me like a slave,” he said. Sanders, who is Black, says Koch Foods drove him out of business with discriminatory practices, many of which are documented in a recent ProPublica investigation.
Read more
As the USDA organic seal becomes ever murkier in its meaning, what choices are left to us?
We want real organic food. We want vegetables and berries grown in the soil. We want cows and chickens raised on pasture. It sounds so simple And it is what the law guarantees us. And it is what most organic farmers in the U.S. provide.
And yet . . . if we look closer, that’s often not what we’re being offered as organic in the grocery stores. If we pull on the thread, the cloth starts to unravel. We see soil farmers and pasture farmers going out of business for lack of demand, even while
Read more
Would you like to see a food system where family farmers, food system workers, local communities and consumers have more power?
Then we need to stop Big Ag corporations from getting even bigger.
The Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act of 2019, introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep.Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), would protect family farmers who are at the mercy of the food and agriculture giants who have the power to raise their costs and cut their pay.
Read more
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calls antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest public health challenges of our time.” In the U.S., at least 2 million people get an antibiotic-resistant infection every year, and at least 23,000 of those people die, the CDC says.
Antibiotic resistance is a global, and worsening, problem
Read more
How we address an expanding list of crises related to global warming is the most demanding question of our day. So far, our approaches have been piecemeal, enormously costly and largely unsuccessful. A common denominator for many of these crises is in how we use the land, and that is where we will find the solution.
Read more
By late 2016, many of the nation’s 25,000 chicken farmers said they had grown bitterly frustrated by the administration of President Barack Obama. Under Obama, top officials had promised to help farmers by tightening regulations on meat processing companies, which for decades had been growing bigger and more powerful.
Read more
You depend on your local farmers for the healthy food you buy at your community’s natural food store and farmers’ market.
Unfortunately, many small family farms struggle to succeed financially. That’s because farm policies favor big farms and multinational agribusiness corporations, not your local farmers.
Read more
New data suggest that a few farms are cashing in on President Trump’s farm bailout in a way that’s not quite in the spirit of the rules. Though no single person was supposed to receive more than $125,000 from 2018’s $12-billion bailout program, The New Food Economy has found that at least one farm has received more than $2 million.
Read more
A bill introduced in Congress today that would temporarily halt agribusiness mergers and launch an effort to improve antitrust enforcement is urgently needed for family farmers struggling with noncompetitive markets that are influencing high costs and low prices, says the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Read more
- Page 1
- ››
for Farm IssuesAlerts
Downloads
Videos
Scientific Studies
Get Local
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
