by Cassandra Sweetman | September 28, 2017 OKLAHOMA CITY – Oklahoma ranchers are pushing back against a proposal to double the fee or “Beef Checkoff” they must pay when they sell their cattle. Right now, there’s a federal mandate that requires farmers to pay $1 for every cow sold. Half of that goes to the…
by DAVID McCUMBER | Sep 27, 2017 In strongly worded letters to the Secretary of Agriculture and to the acting head of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, all members of Montana’s congressional delegation — U.S. Sens. Steve Daines and Jon Tester and U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte — are calling for investigations into the FSIS…
For Immediate Release: September 28, 2017 Billings, Mont. – Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) unveiled its new strategy to expand its mandatory animal identification program at the private sectors’ Strategy Forum on Livestock Traceability held in Denver, Colorado. On the same day, R-CALF USA filed a…
by Jake Spring and Ana Mano, editing by G Crosse | September 27, 2017 BRASILIA/SAO PAULO (Reuters) – The ban on fresh Brazilian beef exports to the United States could be lifted in October, Brazil’s agriculture ministry said late on Tuesday. The ban, implemented in June, would end after the United States finishes its current…
by Chase Purdy | September 20, 2016 Big farms are about to get a lot bigger. With six agricultural giants on the verge of merging into three separate companies, consumers and farmers are feeling uneasy about the global implications and how it might impact the food system. Top executives from Bayer, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical,…
Hoosiers Outspoken On Confined Animal Farms A CAFO off Route 25 in Tippecanoe County. Annie Ropeik/IPB News A legislative study committee took nearly six hours of public testimony and heard a slew of policy recommendation Tuesday on confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. About 100 people showed up to provide comments as the committee considers…
By Luke Runyon | September 25, 2017 In the summer of 2002, water pumps in Colorado’s San Luis Valley stopped working. The center pivot sprinklers that coax shoots from the dry soil and turn the valley into one of the state’s most productive agricultural regions strained so hard to pull water from an underground aquifer…
By Barbara Soderlin | Sep 24, 2017 ELWOOD, Neb. — The sun rises over the bank branch on the other side of Smith Avenue and shines on the Elwood Hometown Cooperative Market, where pots of red geraniums greet customers and a woman sweeps sidewalk debris into a tidy pile. It’s 8 a.m. on a Thursday,…
By Jonathan Foley on March 5, 2013 Only a tiny fraction of corn grown in the U.S. directly feeds the nation’s people, and much of that is from high-fructose corn syrup This essay was posted initially on Ensia.com and is reprinted here with permission. Nothing dominates the American landscape like corn. Sprawling across the Midwest…
September 2017 Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long…