Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Blog”
If GMO’s are so good and so safe, why do we need laws to hide them from scrutiny? But as Bill Maher points out, “When consumers know things, they tend to make informed choices, and that could affect corporate profits. I’m sorry, but your right to know is always going to be outweighed by their right to hide it from you.”
While the phrase “let them eat cake” may never have been uttered in reference to the starving French peasants of the 18th century, the pressure to “let them to eat GM” in the 21st century is alive and well in the lobby shops, corporate suites, press offices and political power centers of the world.
Trade is good, but but “free trade” doesn’t work for farmers or workers or most everyone else. Free trade does, however, work spectacularly well for corporations who have over 600 advisers to the TPP negotiations— we have no access to the negotiations, corporations have plenty.
We are very pleased to post Stephen’s final essay here (Final.May2015.Tolpinrud.Coexistence) and grateful for the opportunity to have worked with him and fellow students through Dr. Graddy-Lovelace’s program.
In honor of 19 landless peasant farmers massacred in Brazil in 1996 we celebrate resistance, solidarity and this year mobilize against Transnational Corporations and Free Trade Agreements.
And no, organic farmers can’t use Roundup®, but if I could why would I want to? It is, after all, a poison, its active ingredient, glyphosate, is a poison, as are some of its “inert” ingredients.
With dairy farmers’ prices plummeting $9.50 per cwt. (hundred weight) from the high point of $26.16 in September 2014 down to the present level of $16.66, it makes one wonder if the net result will come close to the 2009 massacre.
To me it makes more sense to let processors do their own promotion for their own brands, with their own money instead of jumping on the sweating backs of farmers for a mandated checkoff.
Whole-fat dairy products have kept farmer healthy, while federal policies have hurt dairy farmers, their related businesses and communities.
If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em, the old saying goes. So I’ve decided to stop fighting and just build a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) of my own. I’ve figured out the costs and … it’s as good as owning an NFL team, but without most of the head injuries… like the proverbial Cash Cow… only you don’t need a pasture! Here’s how you, too, can be a CAFO owner… in an easy 10 steps:
Bruce Scholten’s in-depth and thoughtful analysis of U.S. organic dairy politics begins with his own memories of growing up on a Washington State dairy farm. From what was common in his childhood, small dairy farms operated by multi-generational family labor, pasturing their cattle, building the soil and supporting local communities, Scholten shows the reader how things have changed over the past five decades.
Many supporters of local food production were glad to see these topics put in print in the New York Times and Washington Post. I agree, food is something everyone deals with everyday, many without thinking about where it came from, how it was produced, what kind of chemical residue it carries, its nutritional value. Others of course probably saw talk of national food policy as more socialism from the liberal media.