by Jeff Stein | October 23, 2018 A Chinese-owned pork producer is eligible for federal payments under President Trump’s $12 billion farm bailout, a program that was established to help U.S. farmers hurt by Trump’s trade war with China. Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based pork producer acquired in 2013 by a Chinese conglomerate now named WH…
by Lisa Held | October 10, 2018 As an advocate, writer, and school food commentator (and Civil Eats contributor), Bettina Elias Siegel has spent the last eight years working on improving the quality of food served in public schools across the country. But her activism started with the desire to change the food her children…
by Sarah Henry | July 27, 2018 Anthony Reyes found his calling working at the intersection of farming and social justice with organizations such as the Tilth Alliance in Seattle, the youth education program Common Threads Farm in Bellingham, and now with the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz. Reyes credits his college days at…
by Mark Tseng-Putterman | Jun 20 Those seeking asylum today inherited a series of crises that drove them to the border A national spotlight now shines on the border between the United States and Mexico, where heartbreaking images of Central American children being separated from their parents and held in cages demonstrate the consequences of…
Last week, Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) board and staff members met in Mississippi, the same state where in 1997 about 50 people from 17 states came together and conceived of the idea to form an organization with a mission to work for transparent, fair and truly competitive agricultural and food markets. 20 years after…
by Walt Davis 1 | Oct 03, 2018 Evidence says use planned grazing, no-till farming with cover cropping, and promote life to skim the excess off the top. The earth and the people who live on it are in for a world of hurt. Bear with me a moment before shutting me down with “Oh,…
by Karin L | October 16, 2018 I’ve gotten to that point in time–or maybe my life–where I just cannot go reading a study and believe it to be factually true. I honestly don’t care how many authors have signed their names to it, or whether it hails from some prestigious university or not. What…
by Walt Davis 1 | Jan 17, 2018 Maybe some people just aren’t capable of understanding complex agricultural-scientific-ecological-economic issues. My grandson sent me an article from National Public Radio that says some researchers see a wreck coming because the demand for grassfat beef is growing so fast that we are in danger of running out…
by Maddy Lauria | Delaware News Journal | October 19, 2018 This weekend, a 59-year-old Bridgeville man will be memorialized after a serious work injury at one of southern Delaware’s chicken processing plants led to his death in early October. The victim was not named by police in a release outlining the accident, but an…
by Eric Schlosser | Oct. 16, 2018 THE POISON SQUAD One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century By Deborah Blum 330 pp. Penguin Press. $28. In April 1906, a Republican president of the United States met privately with a notorious socialist at the White House. The president was…