I had a list of things I needed to get for the farm (I didn’t care where I found them, Farm & Fleet, the Co-op whoever might have them) a feed scoop, a barn broom, a couple of neck straps for the cows, small things, but necessary. I stopped at a big hardware store last Saturday on the way home from the Farmers Market. They used to cater to small farmers — no more, unless you have only horses or pets.
Palestinian Farmer Highlights Food Sovereignty Efforts with USFSA, Iowa CCI
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees, an organization dedicated to assisting Palestinian farmers in the fight for sovereignty over their trade and their land, was born in 1986. ElRahman, the organization’s board chairman, visited the United States for the first time this year to receive the Food Sovereignty Prize from the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance on October 15 in Des Moines, Iowa.
Rural Repression: The Cruel Insanity of Obama’s Agriculture Export Plan
When President Barrack Obama stated in his recent State of the Union address that one avenue to advance the economy was to increase U.S. agricultural exports, I cringed. Right out of Milton Friedman, export agriculture is the neo-liberal free market capitalist approach to agriculture that, if anything, has been successful in destroying family farmers. Obama’s announcement was yet another death-knell to the world’s family farmers. It was a gift to corporate agribusiness. It meant yet another wave of family farmers throughout the world being forced off the land resulting in another period of rural repression and dislocation. Don’t think when you read this that the scenario is somewhere other than the United States. This is a U.S. story as well.
NFFC President Wins James Beard Foundation Leadership Award
We are pleased to announce that NFFC President, Ben Burkett was awarded the 2014 James Beard Foundation Leadership Award on October 27th. The award was given to Ben primarily for his work with The Federation of Southern Cooperatives and their Land Assistance Fund, which aims to enhance and stabilize income for family farms across the south.
Food Sovereignty Award Coverage: Column for The Progressive Populist
Every year since 1986, the Norman Borlaug fan club, made up of the big winners in the Green Revolution, has awarded a prize to some corporate tiller of the field. The “World Food Prize” is headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa in the former public library building. From this modest address, the chemical producers, giant combine builders, soybean processors and hog owners give the award mostly to researchers who have helped build the system of patented seeds and chemical inputs—a system that excludes small farmers and has convinced the rest of us that chemically-flavored soy paste and corn sweeteners are nutrition.
Precision Agriculture and the “Agro-Police State”
A Food First writer suggests Monsanto may have a larger hand in International Agricultural Decision-making than the FAO with the growing influence of precision agriculture.
The Fallacy of Feeding the World
I heard someone talking about our (the USA’s) duty to “feed the world”. I have a real problem with this, who gave us this mandate?
Save us from “Sound Science”
The term “sound science” really creeps me out, that is not a secret. Several months ago I wrote a piece called The Sound Science of Deception, resting my case, but a during recent discussion of federal research funding, there it was again, in USDA.
Supporting Dairy Farmers is Part of a Balanced Diet
Eat fat! That is the message delivered in new studies that suggest Americans have wrongfully avoided fat in their diets for decades. In an effort to deal with the growing epidemic of heart disease, scientists turned their focus to cutting fat from diets. Many of those studies failed to control for major heart disease contributors like smoking, stress, sedentary lifestyles, and obesity. Nonetheless, the war against fat had begun.
Mad Cows, Fat Cats, and Chlorinated Chickens: NFFC protests TAFTA
This week has been a jam packed week here in DC. In addition to the Appropriations process and a few conferences (more on those later), the fifth round of negotiations for the EU-US trade deal (TAFTA, the TransAtlantic Free Trade Agreement, or TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) happened on the George Mason University School of Law campus.
What’s Happening to the Bees?
“Are Your Delicious, Healthy Almonds Killing Bees?” That is the question posed by Tom Philpott last week in Mother Jones. As the acreage in monocropped almonds in California has grown, so too has the reliance on “pollinator services”. Wild honeybees simply cannot pollinate the vast number of almond trees growing in California’s almond country anymore. This year between 15 and 25 percent of beehives in almond groves have experienced “severe” damage says the Pollinator Stewardship Council.
In The Spring—
“In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love”, or so Tennyson told us. But in the corn belt it seems, that rather than thoughts of love, the thoughts of many turn to crop protection chemicals, or in common language, herbicides and insecticides. Whether one is applying them to crops or hoping to avoid their toxic fumes and drift, pesticides will soon be in the air.