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
News that a slight dietary change could dramatically reduce the amount of environmentally harmful methane gas released by cattle has been given an enthusiastic welcome by Irish farmers.
Researchers at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, found the addition of less than 2 per cent dried seaweed to a cow’s diet could reduce their methane emissions by as much as 99 per cent.
Increasing numbers of German farmers are relying on organic production, with 7.5 percent of all arable land now cultivated ecologically. The government has set its sights on an ambitious target of 20 percent.
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not doing enough to prevent weed resistance to the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) says a new report from the EPA's Inspector General's Office, which draws in part on a report from the agbiotech company, Pioneer: Weed Management in the Era of Glyphosate Resistance.
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A People’s Food Policy – a ground-breaking manifesto outlining a people’s vision of food and farming in England that is supported by over 80 food and farming organisations was launched on 26th June, 2017.
The report draws on 18 months of extensive, nation-wide consultations with grassroots organisations, NGOs, trade unions, community projects, small businesses and individuals.
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DvSnf7 dsRNA is an unusual insecticide. You don’t spray it on crops. Instead, you encode instructions for manufacturing it in the DNA of the crop itself. If a pesky western corn rootworm comes munching, the plant’s self-made DvSnf7 dsRNA disrupts a critical rootworm gene and kills the pest.
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Even after having worked as a farmworker for a few years, Eva Chavez still had trouble coping with how exhausted she was after a day of picking apples. “I’d barely make it home because I was so tired,” she remembers. “I’d just park the car outside my house and sleep in the car. I didn’t even want to go inside.”
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In February, Trump ordered his EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, to throw out a 2015 rule that protects seasonal streams and small isolated ponds, which would shrink the reach of the 1972 Clean Water Act by narrowing the definition of “waters of the United States.”
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Just in time for the strawberry harvest, leaders of a union representing hundreds of farmworkers have reached a tentative contract agreement with Sakuma Brothers Farms in Skagit County.
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Researcher Rick Haney travels the U.S. preaching the benefits of healthy soils. In a Yale Environment 360 interview, he talks about the folly of pursuing ever-greater crop yields using fertilizers and other chemicals and how farmland can by restored through natural methods.
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Fair Trade USA’s (FTUSA) label is showing up on fruits and vegetables in produce departments around the country. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily a step forward for farmworkers.
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