Agriculture

Monsanto takes GMOs further to 2,4-D

Tom Laskawy writes for Grist:
When I wrote recently about the next generation of genetically engineered seeds, I was in truth referring to the next next generation. The fact is that the next actual generation of seeds is already out of the lab and poised for approval by the USDA.
And I’m not talking about Monsanto’s recently approved [...]

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Monsanto biopiracy

India’s Environmental Support Group on Monsanto:
If you missed watching Al Jazeera’s The Stream special on Monsanto’s biopiracy in India while advancing Bt Brinjal, and its implications, you can catch it on You Tube. Its about 45 mins. long).  The programme covers many diverse issues, in addition to biopiracy.
The programme was hosted by Derrick Ashong, musician [...]

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Pollinators play a critical role

bee-flickr-panna

Grist reports:
Anyone who’s been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 cropsthey pollinate — from almonds to apples to blueberries — [...]

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GMO corn leading to pesticide resistant bugs

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) – Monsanto Co. corn that is genetically engineered to kill insects may be losing effectiveness against rootworms in four states, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said.
Rootworms in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska are suspected of developing tolerance of the plants’ insecticide, based on documented cases of severe crop damage and reports from [...]

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Get your fresh eggs from free hens

Blogger Happy Homesteader writes:
If you are of a certain age, you will remember the 1980’s anti-drug advertisement where they fry the egg and opine “This is your brain on drugs”.  Well folks this yolk is your body on drugs.  It comes from a chicken that eats sub-standard food and a pharmaceutical soup of antibiotics and [...]

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Occupy the Food System

Willie Nelson appeals to everyone who eats to support small farmers and save the food system:
Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement, there’s a deeper understanding about the power that corporations wield over the great majority of us. It’s not just in the financial sector, but in all facets of our lives. The disparity between [...]

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Major retailers capitulate to Monsanto

Ronnie Cummins of Organic Consumers Association takes the issue on:
“The policy set for GE alfalfa will most likely guide policies for other GE crops as well. True coexistence is a must.”   -  Whole Foods Market, Jan. 21, 2011
In the wake of a 12-year battle to keep Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered (GE) crops from contaminating the nation’s [...]

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Building The Midnight’s New Edible Wall Garden | Gainesville Compost

midnight-garden-lights

By Chris Cano
Check out the Midnight garden, a canvas of “living art” powered by compost produced from the food waste of the Gainesville local restaurant community, including The Midnight’s fruit and vegetable scraps which we collect each week via bicycle.
via Building The Midnight’s New Edible Wall Garden [Photo Story] | Gainesville Compost.

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Antibiotic restriction is a first step

Tom Philpott of Mother Jones looks at the numbers:
For a few months now, President Obama’s FDA has been showing zero appetite for standing up to the meat industry on factory-farm livestock use. In two key decisions (here and here), the agency declined to impose real restrictions on farm drug use, promoting a “voluntary” approach instead.
But [...]

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FDA restricts anitibiotic use in farm animals

The New York Times reports:
WASHINGTON — Federal drug regulators announced on Wednesday that farmers and ranchers must restrict their use of a critical class of antibioticsin cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys because such practices may have contributed to the growing threat in people of bacterial infections that are resistant to treatment.

Enlarge This Image

Veronica [...]

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Michael Pollan’s food classes

Joe Fassler  writes in The Atlantic about Edible Education 101.  Joe Fassler, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. In 2011, his work for TheAtlantic.com was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. He hosts The Lit Show on KRUI radio and litshow.com.
This fall [...]

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Organ damage linked to GMOs

HuffPo reports:
In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto’s GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.
According to the study, which was summarized by Rady Ananda at Food Freedom, “Three varieties of Monsanto’s GM corn [...]

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Town aims for food self-sufficiency

Vincent Graff -of the Daily Mail reports, dailymail.co.uk, on the town that is growing its own:
Admittedly, it sounds like the most foolhardy of criminal capers, and one of the cheekiest, too.
Outside the police station in the small Victorian mill town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire, there are three large raised flower beds.
If you’d visited a few [...]

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Climate change affects turf

Carol Brzozowski reports in Turf Magazine:
Plants are blooming and experiencing leaf budding earlier in public gardens throughout the United States and some plant species, including weeds, are growing in areas they never grew before. Ominously, plant pests are also being seen in new areas.
You won’t find details of these phenomena in the National Oceanic and [...]

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Ag Gag bill introduced in Florida

Earlier this year a bill was introduced in Florida by Senator Jim Norman that would have made it a felony to take photos or video of a farm or agriculture operation.
The “Ag Gag” bill was openly supported by Big Ag and directed at both whistle-blowers who go undercover to document the cruelty that animals on [...]

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Animal People 20th anniversary in 2012

Kim Bartlett, publisher of Animal People, writes:
We all long for a day in which human beings see themselves not as lords and masters of the earth but as good stewards of creation. To get there, the way of thinking about animals as things to be used and abused must be replaced with a model reflecting [...]

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Permaculture embraces sustainable practices

Additional information about permaculture posted online:

Permaculture is a design system based on ethics and design principles which can be used to establish, design, manage and improve all efforts made by individuals, households and communities towards a sustainable future. The permaculture flower uses the evolutionary spiral path to link together the key domains required for this [...]

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Local food makes news in SLO

Chew on this
Locals are finding ways to move away from food created by corporations
BY KATHY JOHNSTON
A quiet revolution is stirring in local kitchens. All over San Luis Obispo County, people are claiming their right to decide what goes in their mouths and their power to choose where it comes from.

CRUNCHY CHOICE

Dan Melton picks out [...]

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Hog farm cleans up

 David Zucchino of the Los Angeles Times reports one of the good stories of 2011:
December 25, 2011

Reporting from Yadkinville, N.C.
Loyd Bryant used to pump manure from his 8,640 hogs into a fetid lagoon, where it raised an unholy stink and released methane and ammonia into the air. The tons of manure excreted daily couldn’t be [...]

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A Deliciously Resourceful Town Aims For Total Food Self-Sufficiency in 7 Years | Wake Up World

Town-Grows-All-Food-1-300x288

The vegetable plots are the most visible sign of an amazing plan: to make Todmorden the first town in the country that is self-sufficient in food.‘And we want to do it by 2018,’ says Mary Clear, 56, a grandmother of ten and co-founder of Incredible Edible, as the scheme is called.‘It’s a very ambitious aim. [...]

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