Posts tagged as farming

America, it’s your responsibility to decide who will emerge victorious from this battle of the bulge. Let’s meet the contestants — the American consumer, the independent farm and the corporate fat cat. Watch now: Food & Water Watch’s The Biggest Farm Bill Loser and find out

Category: Nonprofits & Activism
Uploaded by: GoodFoodnH2O
Hosted: youtube

If you care about the food you eat, call President Obama on June 22 and ask him to protect our food and our farmers. Learn more at www.foodandwaterwatch.org.

Category: Nonprofits & Activism
Uploaded by: GoodFoodnH2O
Hosted: youtube

Last week, soon-to-be-former New York Governor David Paterson surprised many when he vetoed the fracking moratorium and signed an executive order that creates loopholes that could allow some kinds of fracking to continue.  Paterson explained that, “Enacting this legislation would put people out of work…,” referring to jobs associated with drilling. But, there’s another labor force that’s threatened by fracking: upstate New York farmers. Read more…

Maybe we haven’t learned anything from the Great Egg Recall of 2010; at least not enough–not yet. The egg farm mentioned in William Neuman’s New York Times article, and many farms like it, try to adjust their large-scale models of production to address unhygienic conditions and other problems that arise from being so big.

The factory farm model confines thousands of animals into a closed environment that is condusive to the spread of diseases like E. coli and salmonella.

Read more…

500 independent ranchers, farmers, meatpacking workers, consumers, urban farmers and food justice activists gather at a public forum in Colorado on the eve of the DOJ and USDA joint hearing on fair competition in the meat industry.

The American Meat Institute (AMI) thinks that everything is just fine in the meat industry. They represent the biggest meat packers and processors—the ones who have consolidated the meatpacking industry into a market dominated by four firms that exercise tremendous leverage over independent cattle producers. The few companies in control of the market insist that there is nothing wrong.

But, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder were in Fort Collins, Colorado last week, listening to the testimonies of independent ranchers who have been struggling to get fair prices for their cattle from the meat packer monopolies. If nothing is wrong in the meat industry, why would these top U.S. officials travel to the Mountain State to listen to the concerns of ranchers and small farmers at a joint hearing about restoring competition? And why would the groups like the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) and Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF), who represent independent cattle producers, rally thousands of people to attend the hearings? Read more…

CNN's Brian Todd interviews our own Patty Lovera, food director, about how food contamination—like the Wright Egg salmonella outbreak—can spread so quickly. None of the eggs in the background were affected by the recall.

The Wright County Egg recall has continued to raise interesting questions about food safety issues across our industrial food system. Various news stations have been contacting our offices for the past week to ask how food contamination can spread so quickly across the country. CNN’s Brian Todd asked our food director, Patty Lovera, to meet him at a grocery store just outside of downtown Washington, D.C., to discuss the recall (we’ll provide the link as soon as the story airs), so I tagged along. Read more…

Investigations into a multi-state outbreak of salmonella have triggered a major recall of eggs involving 17 states and 380 million eggs—that's one bad egg per person in the United States.

By now, many of us have developed an unnatural but necessary fear of French toast, cake, omelets, egg salad sandwiches and more. Investigations into a multi-state outbreak of salmonella have triggered a major recall of eggs involving 17 states and 380 million eggs (one egg per person in the United States, plus several omelets), and those numbers could continue to grow. The affected eggs were packaged as far back as mid-May—an entire season ago. Read more…

This week, we learned of the latest chain restaurant contrivance to challenge waistband technology: Denny’s has created a mammoth morsel of a cholesterol-rocketing, fat-flapping mistake of a meal. Ladies and gentlemen, Denny’s Fried Cheese Melt Sandwich is not the answer, regardless of the question. Read more…

Who's that guy with the carrot in his mouth?

We had an early start on Friday morning.  Thankfully, local food activists Jeff McCabe and Lisa Gottlieb invited us to stay at their home in Ann Arbor the night before their regular Friday morning community breakfast. FridayMorningsAtSELMA is a local food breakfast salon, where neighbors and activists gather and eat delicious local food and initiate action on community food issues. It was an incredible event to be a part of. Over 60 people came through to share food and ideas. I was up and cooking at 6am, when the crowd started pouring in. With the help of the SELMA volunteers, I helped to prepare whole grain waffles with herb-roasted chicken and grilled apricots for the breakfast guests. Read more…

Last November, agribusiness scored a victory that goes beyond a simple electoral win: Issue 2 in Ohio passed, which not only created a livestock care standards board to counteract a groundswell of support to overhaul factory farming, but did so by amending the state constitution. This board, packed with members that would make Cargill, Smithfield, and Tyson proud, now has free reign to dictate how livestock are raised in Ohio, with state regulators enforcing whatever rules they establish. Read more…