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
Global food movement leaders and organizations representing hundreds of millions of farmers and food workers today set out their clear opposition to “gene drives” – a controversial new genetic forcing technology. Their call for a stop to this technology accompanies a new report, Forcing the Farm, that lifts the lid on how gene drives may harm food and farming systems.
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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) supported President Donald Trump’s $12 billion bailout for U.S. farmers to mitigate the damaging effects of the trade war. Now the senator is applying for those same bailout funds for his own 750-acre Iowa farm, The Washington Post reports.
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North Carolina is home to 9.7 million pigs that produce 10 billion gallons of manure annually. As rivers crested on Wednesday, state officials believed that at least 110 hog manure lagoons—open, earthen pools where pig waste is liquified and broken down by anaerobic bacteria (causing their bubblegum-pink color) before being sprayed on fields—had been breached or inundated by flood waters across the state.
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According to the USDA's definition, those farms definitely are "family farms." But so, under this definition, are multi-thousand-acre corporate entities using automated machinery to grow genetically engineered corn. The Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism looked more deeply into the definition and why it matters.
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Unless you happened to purchase your chicken at a local farm, farmers market or food co-op, and can attest that it was raised on pasture, the way many people think their chicken is raised, it likely came from a major player in the industry, like Perdue or Tyson.
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Almost 200 of 1,638 acres in an Albany-based farm collective are devoted to pecan trees. Harvest season could come as early as next week, but farmers are already worried they will see lower profits this fall. Georgia pecans have become very popular overseas in recent years, particularly in China, but in April, tariffs on pecans imported into China jumped by 15 percent.
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Farmers across the country are in a state of emergency with dairy and grain producers, new farmers, and farmers of color being hit the hardest.
Joe Schroeder works as a farm advocate for Farm Aid, where he answers calls to the group’s farmer hotline. The calls, which are up 30 percent over last year, range from routine questions about navigating federal programs and exploring credit options to dire pleas for help from farmers who have run out of ways to keep their
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Soil health directly affects plant, animal and human health. It also impacts topsoil erosion, water management and ocean pollution. Most importantly, it is now recognized that climate change is directly related to soil mismanagement. I believe a global soil health initiative can help save our planet.
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Ott Saareväli, the owner of a pig farm in Lääne county in Estonia, is starting all over again. In September last year, government vets diagnosed an outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) in a section of the farm where pregnant sows are held ahead of farrowing.
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If you believe carbon farming is a big part of the solution to climate change, then you need to learn more about The Environmental Cowboy and his new film “A Dry Hope.”
Khory Hancock, an Australian environmental scientist, climate change solutions strategist and documentarian who is best known as The Environmental Cowboy, recently went on a journey through New South Wales to see firsthand the impacts of what
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