June 30, 2014 JBS workers in Greeley vote to strike Workers at the JBS beef plant in Greeley have voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. More than 99 percent of those who voted supported the strike action, according to a news release from the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 union. A steady stream…

6/29/14 9:46 AM EDT Neither the United States Trade Representative nor the Department of Agriculture are saying yet which way the World Trade Organization has ruled in relation to the latest complaints against USDA’s Country of Origin Labeling rule. But a group of 62 trade associations, food manufacturers and other organizations have gone ahead and…

THE ECONOMIC PAMPHLETEER Limits to Economic Growth by John Ikerd http://dx.doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2014.043.006, pp. 15–17 Posted online May 16, 2014 Note: This is the first of two columns dealing with questions of economic growth. See the second column in the summer 2014 issue. First paragraphs: I am often asked why so few agricultural economists seem interested in…

Former GIPSA Chief Sets Record Straight After Personal Attacks From Industrial Agriculture Activist Billings, Mont. – In a recently published article, J. Dudley Butler, immediate past administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA), was personally attacked by Steve Dittmer, an industrial agriculture activist who has long defended…

Confronting The Lie: Open Letter to Steve Dittmer June 24, 2014 Dear Mr. Dittmer, After reading Mike Callicrate’s article about you in the OCM newsletter, I feel compelled to respond to your recent blog about me and the good hardworking employees at GIPSA that I was honored to lead. Two old sayings come to mind…

“…he would “get totally freaked out and have a battle of wills with the cows.” Now he reacts with calm and temporarily stops herding to avoid upsetting the animals.” A Second Career, Happily in the Weeds By DAVID WALLISJUNE 20, 2014 Photo Charles Nobel, a retired school administrator turned rancher, produces grass-fed beef in Stone…

How America became uncompetitive and unequal (Jasper Rietman for The Washington Post) By Lina Khan and Sandeep Vaheesan June 13 Lina Khan is a policy analyst for the Markets, Enterprise and Resiliency Initiative at the New America Foundation. Sandeep Vaheesan is special counsel at the American Antitrust Institute. Since the early 1980s, executives and financiers…

Parasites, Killing Their Host The Food Industry’s Solution to Obesity JUNE 17, 2014 Mark Bittman You can buy food from farmers — directly, through markets, any way you can find — and I hope you do. But unless you’re radically different from most of us, much of what you eat comes from corporations that process,…

Alice Waters: The Fate of Our Nation Rests on School Lunches Alice Waters June 16, 2014 Alice Waters attends the TIME 100 Gala, TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 29, 2014 in New York City. Kevin Mazur—Getty Images philosopher Brillat-Savarin who wrote, “The destiny of nations…

Harvard Business Review calls bullshit on today’s "capitalists" Fourteen years ago, the 1% got the tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks which they had repeatedly assured us would usher in an era of boundless prosperity. What was ushered in instead was the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression – an ongoing disaster that is exacerbated…