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
Regenerative agriculture and holistic livestock management represent the next, crucial stage of organic food and farming, not only avoiding toxic pesticides, fertilizers, sewage sludge, GMO seeds, and excessive greenhouse gas emissions, but regeneratingsoil fertility, water retention, carbon sequestration, and rural livelihoods as well.
Regeneration has now become the hottest topic in the natural and organic food sector. At the same time, climate activists regularly discuss the role of organic and regenerative
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Tech billionaire Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, may seem a strange fit for the role of America’s top farmer. But he’s been quietly amassing massive tracts of U.S. land under the cover of investment firm Cascade Investment LLC, and now owns a minimum of 242,000 acres of U.S. farmland.
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Over the past seven months, new lawsuits have been filed almost every day claiming farmers or field workers contracted Parkinson’s disease from their exposure to Paraquat, a highly toxic herbicide developed by Syngenta AG and sold in the U.S. by Chevron Corp.
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On 104 acres in Wales, the farmers of the Little Jubba agrarian commons are demonstrating another model for American agriculture — and replanting what was once uprooted.
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Almost 90% of the $540bn in global subsidies given to farmers every year are “harmful”, a startling UN report has found.
This agricultural support damages people’s health, fuels the climate crisis, destroys nature and drives inequality by excluding smallholder farmers, many of whom are women, according to the UN agencies.
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Among farmers, ranchers and even municipalities, “there seems to be a real connecting of the dots ... about water and soil stewardship,” and it’s driving cross-state conversations about solutions, says Kremen, from the Ogallala Water Coordinated Agriculture Project.
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Factory farming operations have swallowed up much of the U.S. farming economy, and independent farmers warn that we’re not prepared for the future they have in store for us.
A proposed concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) in Burnett County, Wisconsin, is slated to house 26,000 hogs and produce millions of gallons of liquid manure every year. Residents fear the irreparable damage an operation of that size could do to their air, land, and waterways, as well as to their property values
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Billions of dollars in aid and subsidies for industrial agriculture in Africa are harming food security in one of the world’s hungriest regions, according to a network of African groups asking donors to switch their funding to African-led efforts and agroecology.
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Jesse Frost and his wife Hannah Crabtree have been farming together since 2011, when they met working as apprentices on a small organic farm in southern Kentucky. Eventually, they started their own small market garden operation nearby, Rough Draft Farm, where they started experimenting with cutting down on tillage a few years later. By 2017, they had gone completely no-till.
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The beef packing industry is now dominated by four large multinational corporations – Cargill, Tyson, the Brazilian firm JBS and National Beef Packing, which is controlled by another Brazilian company.
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