
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!
After the meatpacking giant purchased a bankrupt facility in Colorado to convert it to beef processing, Western ranchers worry about further consolidation of an already fraught business.
Read moreI remember the first time someone called me out for my white privilege. It was decades ago by a Black food activist in Detroit. Naturally I was offended – the label stung coming from someone who had no sense of me other than the color of my skin. My so-called white privilege was growing up in an ill-heated farm house without running water watching my parents eke out our living on a small farm. Where was the privilege in this?
Read moreOne day in July, Crystal Clair received a strange package in the mail. She opened it and found a round piece of wire with tiny teeth like those on a saw blade. She didn’t know what it was but when she showed it to her husband, Randy, he told her it was a garrote, a strangulation device.
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Adam Chappell was a slave to pigweed. In 2009, several years prior to the roller coaster rise and fall of commodity prices, he was on the brink of bankruptcy and facing a go broke or go green proposition. Drowning in a whirlpool of input costs, Chappell cut bait from conventional agriculture and dove headfirst into a bootstrap version of innovative farming.
Read moreIn the latter part of 2016, Ethan Steinberg and two of his friends planned a driving tour across the U.S. to interview farmers. Their goal was to solve a riddle that had been bothering each of them for some time. Why was it, they wondered, that American agriculture basically ignored trees?
Read moreIn this episode of the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, John interviews Zach Bush MD, an educator and a triple board-certified physician who specializes in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. Zach brings his understanding of the systemic challenges in pharmaceuticals and farming to non-profits such as Farmer’s Footprint and Non-Toxic Neighborhoods, where he works to create collaborative communities to solve these human
Read moreThe May 20th, 2020 USDA retail beef value was reported at $7.58 per pound, up $1.41 per pound from a year ago. Live cattle slaughter weights were reported at 1,370 pounds. Retail beef yield from a 1,370 pound steer or heifer will be around 575 pounds (42% of live weight).
Read moreThe Environmental Protection Agency on Monday declared it would not immediately honor a court ruling handed down last week that banned certain herbicides made by three of the world’s largest chemical companies.
The move by the EPA
Read moreSupermarket customers are paying more for beef than they have in decades during the coronavirus pandemic. But at the same time, the companies that process the meat for sale are paying farmers and ranchers staggeringly low prices for cattle.
Read moreLast week, an Intensive Care doctor in a central Florida hospital placed a call to Mexico to the parents of Juan Santiago (pseudonym) to inform them that their son was not expected to survive the next twenty-four hours. The next day, Juan, a farmworker from Immokalee, Florida, died from complications of the novel coronavirus.
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