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
Few people know the pig business like North Carolina’s Don Webb.
Webb raised pigs in Wilson County, North Carolina, until, in the late 70s, residents told him the smell near his farms was unbearable. He tried some solutions. They didn’t work.
“I was riding down the road and got to thinking of my own mother and father and what would I do if one of these was their homes [near the pig farms],” Webb said in his heavy Southern drawl. “So I got out of the business.”
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Thanks to conscious organic consumers like you, demand for organic foods in the U.S. is at a record high. More and more conventional farmers are looking over the fence and wondering if organic can work for them.
To teach these farmers how to grow organic, we rely on our allies at the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES). They provide farmer-to-farmer education on successful organic practices through the annual MOSES Organic Farming Conference, and through on-farm field days, and a mentoring program.
The 2015 MOSES Organic Farming Conference will
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So just how serious is the impact of industrial farming? Worse than you could ever imagine, writes organic farmer Julian Rose in this review of 'Farmageddon - the Real Price of Cheap Food', which lifts the lid on the industry's human and ecological devastation, and the systematic cruelty inflicted on the animals that feed us.
Whatever happened that led a great part of humankind to give the animal kingdom such a lowly status in the overall evolutionary pattern of life on Earth?
How is it that we have subjected millions and millions of our animal cousins to concentration camp
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Photo courtesy of USDA NRCS
A “Cow Palace” in Washington State threatens public health with its acres of untreated animal waste.
A city in Iowa spends nearly $1 million a year to keep illness-causing nitrates, generated by farm runoff, out of public drinking water.
And who can forget the plight of Toledo, Ohio, residents whose water last summer was so contaminated by farm runoff that they couldn’t even bathe in it, much less drink it?
For decades, America’s chemical-intensive, industrial farming operations have spewed nitrates and other toxic chemicals, animal waste, ammonia, antibiotics, carbon
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Photo Credit: TNFarmersWife.blogspot.com
Trends are always fun to follow. Even if you're not into the latest and greatest, it's interesting to see how our culture evolves year after year. Whether it's fashion, cars, entertainment, technology or whatever else you're into, opinions and tastes come and go.
For 2015, there are several trends hitting the market that we may not have seen coming even a year ago. From larger smartphone screens to tinier houses, trends tell a tale of taste cycles and niche fulfillment that is often hard to predict.
In this article, I wanted to take a look at five of my own
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Essential oils often evoke thoughts of scented candles and day spas, but their benefits beyond relaxation are less well-known.
Essential oils are ultimately just plant extracts — and those are used in countless cleaning and personal-careproducts, and are the main ingredient in some pest-control products and some over-the-counter medications, like Vick’s VapoRub and some lice sprays.
They’re used in the food industry because of their preservative potency against food-borne pathogens — thanks to their antimicrobial, antibacterial, and antifungal properties.
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At a remote research center on the Nebraska plains, scientists are using surgery and breeding techniques to re-engineer the farm animal to fit the needs of the 21st-century meat industry. The potential benefits are huge: animals that produce more offspring, yield more meat and cost less to raise.
There are, however, some complications.
Pigs are having many more piglets — up to 14, instead of the usual eight — but hundreds of those newborns, too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed each year when their mothers roll over. Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time,
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A Des Moines utility's plan to sue three northwest counties for polluting central Iowa's drinking water supply may have broad ramifications for state and U.S. farmers, who environmentalists complain have been too slow to embrace meaningful conservation practices.
It's too soon to say exactly how Des Moines Water Works' threatened lawsuit could play out in farm fields across Iowa and the nation.
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Monsanto sells soybean seeds coated in neonicotinoids (a class of pesticides directly linked to the mass die-off of honeybees) under pretense of helping farmers increase their yields.
But according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), pre-treating soybean seeds with neonics doesn’t deliver on that promise. And now, new evidence suggests that not only do pretreated soybean seeds not provide any benefit to farmers, they may actually cause a decrease in crop yields.
So why perpetuate the madness? When we know neonics are poisoning pollinators, our soil,
Read morecattle electrified fences
Calling something “old-fashioned” might encourage tourists and antique buyers to take note, but it does not captivate the hearts and minds of our mainstream culture.
Too often, the Earth-stewardship movement positions itself as one of returning to a bygone era — to the good old days, pre-electricity and pre-petroleum. While washboards, hoop skirts and hearth cooking may have romantic appeal, living that way doesn’t inspire the imagination of today’s solution-seekers.
Even the majority of people who yearn for simpler times and a slower lifestyle don’t really want to go without
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