by Charles Bethea | September 21, 2018 When I first spoke to Elsie Herring, this past Sunday, as floodwaters were rising to historic levels on the Carolina coast, the seventy-year-old retiree was fixing two leaks in the roof of her hundred-year-old family home in Wallace, North Carolina. She asked me to call her back. When…
by Donnelle Eller | September 22, 2018 A northwest Iowa community has been blanketed with the smell of dead, rotting pigs. The odor from a nearby rendering plant has driven fans from baseball fields and forced mourners to remain in their cars during graveside rites. “It’s the most putrid smell I’ve ever smelled,” Estherville resident…
by JAMEY KEATEN | September 23, 2018 GENEVA (AP) – Swiss voters on Sunday roundly rejected two proposals aimed at protecting Swiss farmers and ensuring that food from both domestic and foreign producers is healthier, more environmentally sound and animal-friendly. About 61.3 percent of voters rejected the “Fair-Food Initiative,” which would have required the government…
by Rick Dove | September 22 I’ve been watching from the air with alarm. Though corporate farmers call them “lagoons,” I hesitate to use that word. Really, they’re cesspools: unlined open-air pits, often containing millions of gallons of hog feces and urine. North Carolina is home to the second-largest number of hogs in the country,…
October 8, 2017 | Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico’s farms. Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with Ricardo Fernández of Puerto Rico Farm Credit about what happened and how farmers are recovering from the storm. Transcript: LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is on the cusp of an agricultural renaissance. Local…
by Deena Shanker | September 21, 2018 Animal welfare advocates call the practice of using gestation crates cruel and inhumane. Companies pledge to stop. Consumers are increasingly turning to organic, antibiotic-free and “natural” animal food products to opt out of a system they see as cruel or incompatible with their values. For busy adults trying…
by Andrew Wasley, Ben Stockton, Natalie Jones and Alexandra Heal | September 19, 2018 Tests at meat packing plants show no reduction in drugs, a year after new rules to clamp down on overuse Antibiotics crucial to human medicine are still being used in “unacceptable” quantities on US livestock farms, despite rules brought in last…
by H. Claire Brown | September 20th, 2018 It’s not easy to talk about, but it’s a very real part of the disaster recovery process. Now, federal agencies are encouraging farmers to compost their carcasses. By Thursday afternoon, state estimates for the total number of North Carolina farm animal lives lost during Hurricane Florence and…
by Staff Report | September 20, 2018 The Organization for Competitive Markets reports that the Eighth Circuit will hear the case regarding the USDA pulling the GIPSA updates, on September 26 at 9 a.m. in St. Louis, Mo. According to OCM, The Farmer Fair Practices Rule (GIPSA Rule) would have allowed farmers to hold agribusinesses…
by Ricardo Salvador, Director, Food & Environment Program | September 19, 2018 At the Union of Concerned Scientists, we have long advocated agricultural systems that are productive and better for the environment, the economy, farmers, farmworkers and eaters than the dominant industrial system. We refer to such a system as our Healthy Farm vision. Based…