by Andrew Martin | February 1, 2019 Trump’s USDA is looking to speed up the slaughter line. In an Illinois River town where Abe Lincoln once toiled as a country lawyer, the slaughterhouse of the future runs at a speed that generations of Midwestern farmers would have dismissed as fantasy. At other factories, as many…
January 17, 2019 Recalls of hazardous meat and poultry have gone up by more than 80 percent in the last six years, according to a new report out Thursday morning. One in six Americans get sick every year from eating contaminated food leading to at least 3,000 deaths per year – 450 from salmonella alone….
February 1, 2019 Amazon has been forced to remove an array of products from its website in India to comply with new regulations. The rules prevent online retailers from selling products through vendors in which they hold an equity stake. The regulations are expected to have a far-reaching impact on India’s e-commerce sector, which has…
Editorial: Legislation promotes a soil health initiative for Nebraska agriculture · Editorial staff 2.1.19 BRENDAN SULLIVAN/THE WORLD-HERALD Unconventional cultivation methods have taken root in a number of Nebraska farms. These methods, such as no-till farming and use of diverse cover crops, are praised for their promotion of soil health. The benefits of this approach, and…
by Kate Cox & H. Claire Brown | January 31, 2019 As public funding for university research has dried up, private industry money has poured in. And with industry money comes industry priorities. In a windowless conference room, epidemiologist Steve Wing was frantically blacking out chunks of his own research. Wing had been working on…
posted November 1, 2017 Nearly 9000 square-miles of ocean along the Gulf Coast is uninhabitable by marine life. Loaded with agricultural toxins and devoid of oxygen, it’s the largest “dead zone” in US history, and last summer it got even bigger. We’ve known the cause of the ecological “dead zone” for decades — fertilizer run-off…
by Gracy Olmstead | September 10, 2018 The Grapes of Wrath and its vision of enslavement to big agribusiness isn’t just our past—it is our present too. “It’s like watching a state circle the drain.” That’s what journalist Corie Brown said about Kansas on a recent Strong Towns podcast. This April, Brown wrote a piece…