Bloomberg Businessweek Agriculture The Life and Times of a Sirloin Steak By Andrew Martin and Alan Bjerga February 27, 2014

February 25, 2014 Where’s the Beef: A Primer on the Beef Checkoff Tax The questions began in 1996 when the National Cattlemen’s Association (NCA) voted to merge with the Beef Industry Council (BIC) forming the organization with the mind numbing name of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA). Up until then, there was little organized…

Chicken Farming and Its Discontents By Andrew Jenner on February 24, 2014 There was a time, say a decade or so ago, when Mike Weaver was making decent money on chickens. He’s still raising them on the farm he bought in Fort Seybert, West Virginia, after retiring from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law…

Nimans fight blanket recall Christopher Peak Bolinas rancher Bill Niman, who left the company he founded to pursue more ethical practices in raising grass-fed beef, says he stands to lose more than $300,000 if the U.S.D.A. does not exempt him from a mass recall of cattle slaughtered in Petaluma last year. By Christopher Peak 02/20/2014…

Journalist: Tyson’s ‘chickenization’ of meat industry turns farmers into serfs by Jennifer 8. Lee Capital Area Food Bank of Texas / Flickr How much do you really know about the chicken on your dinner plate? Journalist Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business, spent more than a decade…

Is That Sausage Worth This? FEB. 19, 2014 NYT Nicholas Kristof Modern factory farms have so much wrong with them, but a starting point is the practice of turning pigs into cannibals. A video, taken secretly by an undercover worker and scheduled to be released on Thursday by the Humane Society of the United States,…

Q: You were saying over lunch that we’re seeing some fundamental changes in agriculture that historians are going to rank right up there with the invention of John Deere’s plow, the tractor and hybrid seed corn. How about looking into your guru’s crystal ball and telling me what you seen happening in farming by the…

“A new factor is being introduced into the agricultural situation through the development of huge estates, owned by corporations and operated by salaried managers upon a purely industrial system.” – 1917 Farm tenancy in Kansas 1917-2014 Friday, 21 February 2014 16:43 Tom Giessel The Twentieth Biennial Report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture was…

Justice Department asked to block Ardent Mills formation By Howard Pankratz The Denver Post 02/18/2014 The American Antitrust Institute and Food & Water Watch on Tuesday asked the U.S. Justice Department to block the formation of Ardent Mills, which would be the nation’s largest flour miller and be based in Colorado. In July, ConAgra Foods,…

When I first heard that the Montana Beef Council was partnering with Wendy’s to promote North American Beef I let out a string of expletives deleted. I suspect I wasn’t the only one. Subsequently I learned through a reliable source more of the details of how this happened. According to my source, the Wendy’s of…