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!
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Apples· steve urow© 2014 -
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steve urow's garden not· steve urow© 2014
Billions of dollars in aid and subsidies for industrial agriculture in Africa are harming food security in one of the world’s hungriest regions, according to a network of African groups asking donors to switch their funding to African-led efforts and agroecology.
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Jesse Frost and his wife Hannah Crabtree have been farming together since 2011, when they met working as apprentices on a small organic farm in southern Kentucky. Eventually, they started their own small market garden operation nearby, Rough Draft Farm, where they started experimenting with cutting down on tillage a few years later. By 2017, they had gone completely no-till.
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The beef packing industry is now dominated by four large multinational corporations – Cargill, Tyson, the Brazilian firm JBS and National Beef Packing, which is controlled by another Brazilian company.
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Grocery store beef prices are rising. The rancher’s share is falling. And the companies that dominate the highly-concentrated meatpacking industry are making a killing.
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The beef packing industry is now dominated by four large multinational corporations – Cargill, Tyson, the Brazilian firm JBS and National Beef Packing, which is controlled by another Brazilian company.
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Fishermen who make their living off adult salmon are sounding the alarm as blistering heat waves and extended drought in the US West raise water temperatures and imperil fish.
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Meredith Ellis views her family’s cattle ranch in Rosston, Texas, as a giant experiment in how to store more carbon in the soil, improve water quality, and maximize biodiversity. In recent years, Ellis, who works with her father, GC Ellis, has been adding warm-season cover crops to winter wheat fields, rotating the cattle between pastures more frequently, and leaving the grass much higher to build more soil carbon and habitat for wildlife.
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Continuing a trend well established by prior Republican and Democratic administrations, four of the five newest appointees to the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) have a current or past relationship with the industry’s major lobby group, the Organic Trade Association (OTA).
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On Vancouver Island, seaweed is abundant, diverse, useful, and symbolic. Indigenous peoples have used it for centuries for food preparation, fishing, and as a cultural and spiritual touchstone. On the island’s southwest coast, Dr. Louis Druehl started farming and researching kelp in the late 1970s and says he has dedicated his life to it “and loved every minute.”
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Perennials belong in your garden and on your farm, according to Eric Toensmeier, keynote speaker at NOFA/Mass Winter Conference. “We need to increase the percentage of our food that comes from perennial crops,” he said. “We should be perennializing Massachusetts agriculture,” and home gardeners can play a key role in that process, not just in planting proven perennials, but in testing and developing new varieties that farmers can then scale up.
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