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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steve urow's garden not· steve urow© 2014
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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The White House will unveil an executive order in the coming days that directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture to clarify that meat can only receive a “Product of USA” label if that livestock is raised in the U.S. rather than abroad, press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Tuesday afternoon.
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Scott Chang-Fleeman has had a challenging couple of years. Even before the pandemic, his solo farming venture, Shao Shan Farm in Bolinas, California, had to contend with broken equipment and flash floods. Then, when the pandemic hit, Chang-Fleeman had to quickly pivot from supplying restaurants with his produce to selling it directly to consumers at farmers’ markets and through a community supported agriculture (CSA) program.
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Fed up with being besieged by criminal organizations, avocado and blackberry producers in Michoacán formed their own armed group that is successfully keeping cartel members out of four municipalities.
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Grants made by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote agricultural development in Africa and other parts of the world overwhelmingly went to research institutes rather than farmers. They were also mainly directed at shaping policies to support industrial farming, not smallholders.
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Wine grape growers in Texas and surrounding states filed a lawsuit last week against drug-maker Bayer-Monsanto and chemical giant BASF for the damage their cotton herbicide has caused to vineyards. Attorneys for the grape growers say the highly volatile herbicide called dicamba is drifting to nearby vineyards and crippling the nonresistant grapes.
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Farmers of color are set to get some unprecedented debt relief starting this month from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The latest federal COVID aid package includes an estimated $4 billion for the USDA to wipe away these farmers' debts.
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Fair Trade USA released a new “Fair Trade Dairy” label in partnership with Chobani. It’s a program that has been opposed by farmworker and human rights organizations since it was first announced. Now that there is yogurt on the shelf, but still no final standard released, this report looks at the label claims and evaluates “Fair Trade Dairy” based on the available standards.
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In late January last year, dairy farmers filled a pub in the tiny town of Greenwald, Minnesota (population 238). Organisers from the Land Stewardship Project – a sustainable agriculture nonprofit – expected 50 people to attend, but 130 showed up from all corners of the state.
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Biden administration environmental officials say they will consider restrictions on the world’s most widely used herbicide because of concerns about potential harm to monarch butterflies and other species. The manufacturer of the weedkiller Roundup, Monsanto, has been hit with multimillion-dollar jury verdicts in suits by cancer victims.
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