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Farmers are to be rewarded for protecting the environment, improving access to the countryside and boosting animal welfare under proposals outlined in the government's Agriculture Bill. Currently, British farmers get around £3.4bn a year in subsidies under the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with the money distributed in the main on the basis of the size of the farm.
Imagine you awake early one morning to hear about the disappearance of 100 million people from North America. That’s right. A hundred million people removed from the continent’s population over a 50-year period. Oh my, you might say over your coffee. How catastrophic. “I live here. And why didn’t anyone notice?”
You probably don’t give antibiotics much thought—until you need them. But what happens if you need them, and they don’t work?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says antibiotic-resistant bacteria and fungi cause more than 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. On average, someone in the U.S. gets an antibiotic-resistant infection every 11 seconds. And every 15 minutes someone dies.
One of the big reasons infections have grown resistant to antibiotics? Industrial factory farms—which use nearly 12 million pounds of medically important antibiotics every year to stave off diseases caused by filthy, crowded conditions, and (though they don’t like to admit it), to make animals grow faster.
Ben & Jerry’s will no longer state on its packaging that the milk and cream used in its ice cream comes from “happy cows.”
That’s (a little) good news for consumers who have been misled for years into thinking that all of the milk and cream in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream comes from dairy farms where cows contentedly frolic outdoors. It doesn’t. In fact, Ben & Jerry's uses milk from conventional, industrial factory farm-style farms.
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream packaging will continue to use the brand’s cartoon image of a cow—depicted outdoors, on a green pasture, under a big blue sky. According to the lawyers representing Ben & Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, the cows “did not look happy to begin with.”
We’ll let you be the judge of whether or not Ben & Jerry’s cartoon cows look “happy.” But to be clear—no matter how much fun the media is having with this happy cow narrative—Ben & Jerry’s deceptive marketing tactics are serious business.
As reported by U.S. Right to Know last May, court documents showed that a domestic policy advisor at the White House said, ‘We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.’ In a new and unsettling report from the Center for Biological Diversity, we now have confirmation that this promise is being kept.
Organic Consumers Association (OCA) today issued the following statement upon learning that Ben & Jerry’s will no longer claim on product packaging that its ice cream comes from “happy cows”:
"The removal of misleading ‘happy cow’ claims is a victory for consumers and an indication that Ben & Jerry’s can’t back up those claims,” said OCA International Director Ronnie Cummins. “But this is just one small step toward more honest representation of the Ben & Jerry’s brand. OCA will continue, through our own ongoing litigation against Ben & Jerry’s and its parent company, Unilever, to push for Ben & Jerry’s either to live up to its remaining marketing claims, or to remove all claims that have no basis in fact.”
Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc. has dropped the claim that the milk for its ice cream comes from "happy" cows. The word that the cows may not be contented comes in the company's response to a federal consumer fraud lawsuit. That case, filed in October, alleges the Vermont ice cream maker misleads the public about how its farms treat their animals and protect the environment.
In a hall filled to the rafters with agroecological and regenerative farmers, a man approaches the podium.
Most already know what he’s going to say, but they’ve come to listen anyway—only half believing that what they’ve seen and heard about his assault on farming and farmers could be accurate.
George Monbiot is a journalist and author specializing in environmental issues. His work is read all over the world. You could be forgiven for thinking that he might be on the side of agroecological farming. But increasingly he isn’t. And if there was ever any doubt of this, Monbiot’s performance at the UK’s prestigious Oxford Real Farming Conference, following the debut of his TV documentary, “Apocalypse Cow,” was enough to remove any last shred of that doubt.
Anticipation is building around the belief that there could soon be an announcement of at least a partial settlement of U.S. lawsuits pitting thousands of U.S. cancer patients against Monsanto Co. over allegations the company hid the health risks of its Roundup herbicides.
Factory farms are a threat to Iowans. We get the pollution, our farmers get the risk, and our quality of life takes a dive—all while corporate ag rakes in massive profits.
With an average of 500 additional factory farms being built in Iowa each year, we need to act fast to protect our environment, our communities and our climate.
TAKE ACTION: Join the Stop Factory Farms Lobby Day. RSVP here.
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