NewsTrust - Farming - Most Recent Stories

Parkinson's Alley

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Sierra Club - By Joy Horowitz - Dec. 20 (News Report) - Recent studies have found statistical links between pesticide use and an outbreak of Parkinson's disease in California farm towns. Researchers even know which chemicals are the likely culprits. What's the government doing about it? Not much.

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Theft in progress: Big Ag raids the treasury—with help from Congress

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Grist - By Tom Laskawy. - Nov. 17 (News Analysis) - by Tom Laskawy. If the straight-up taxpayer swindle taking place in the supercommittee isn’t making you angry, you’re probably not paying attention. I’m talking about the attempt by agribusiness and a group of willing farm-state representatives to put billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of industrial farmers during the ongoing super committee Farm Bill negotiations. According to The Hill , the moment of truth is upon us: The supercommittee is indeed poised to rewrite the Farm Bill behind closed doors and with no input from reform-minded congresspeople, let alone the public. Many of us have knew this was going on, but the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found some new developments that are nothing short of shocking. EWG reports that the new “shallow loss” subsidy which would protect commodity growers from small price drops via a “taxpayer-paid guarantee of getting no less than 90%[!!] of their income.” This new subsidy is now considered ...

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GM crops promote superweeds, food insecurity and pesticides, say NGOs

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By John Vidal - Oct. 19 (News Report) - Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly increased the use of chemicals and the growth of "superweeds", according to a report by 20 Indian, south-east Asian, African and Latin American food and conservation groups representing millions of people. The so-called miracle crops, which were first sold in the US about 20 years ago and which are now grown in 29 countries on about 1.5bn hectares (3.7bn acres) of land, have been billed as potential solutions to food crises, climate change and soil erosion, but the assessment finds that they have not lived up to their promises. The report claims that hunger has reached "epic proportions" since the technology was developed. Besides this, only two GM "traits" have been developed on any significant scale, despite investments of tens of billions of dollars, and benefits such as drought ...

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Attack of the Monsanto Superinsects

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tom Philpott - Sep. 03 (News Report) - insects are developing resistance to Monsanto's insecticide-infused crops, reports the Wall Street Journal. Fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn in some areas of the Midwest are showing damage from the corn rootworm—the very species targeted by Monsanto's engineered trait. An Iowa State University scientist has conclusively identified Bt-resistant root worms in four Iowa fields, the Journal reports.

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Breeding crops with deeper roots could 'slash CO2 levels'

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - Aug. 03 (News) - Writing in the Annals of Botany, Professor Douglas Kell argues that developing crops that produce roots more deeply in the ground could harvest more carbon from the air, and make crops more drought resistant, while dramatically reducing carbon levels.

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Wafting poison makes fertile ground for suit in Stearns County

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Minneapolis Star Tribune - By Josephine Marcotty - Jul. 26 (News Report) - Court rules pesticide drifting onto organic farm constitutes trespass.

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Violence, Potential Job Losses Hang Over Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dave Jamieson - Jul. 20 (News Report) - As U.S. lawmakers inch closer to enacting a long-stalled free trade agreement with Colombia, the deal's proponents have cited the safer atmosphere for finally pushing the deal through. But for Juan Cambindo, a Colombian sugar cane worker and union leader, the news of significant progress has come as a great surprise. Like many other Colombians, Cambindo says he has had his life threatened because of union ties. He first learned of his new and improved lot while watching television. "The United States was talking about how our situation has gotten better," Cambindo, who visited Washington last week to voice his opposition to the deal, told HuffPost through a translator (video below). "But that's not true. Our situation continues to be bad, and it's getting worse."

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Horse welfare declines after closing of U.S. slaughter plants

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

billingsgazette.com - By Jan Falstad - Jun. 25 (News Report) - The closure of the last U.S. horse slaughter plants in the fall of 2007 has failed to reduce the number of horses shipped to slaughter.

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An environmental journalist's lament

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Breakthrough Journal - By Hannah Nordhaus - Jun. 25 (News Analysis) - Dying bees have become symbols of environmental sin, of faceless corporations out to ransack nature. Such is the story environmental journalism tells all too often. But it's not always the story that best helps us understand how we live in this world of nearly seven billion hungry people, or how we might square our ecological concerns and commitments with that reality. By engaging in simplistic and sometimes misleading environmental narratives -- by exaggerating the stakes and brushing over the inconvenient facts that stand in the way of foregone conclusions -- we do our field, and our subjects, a disservice.

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Roundup: Scientists Say World's Top-Selling Weedkiller Causes Birth Defects

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Lucia Graves - Jun. 24 (News Report) - The chemical at the heart of the planet's most widely used herbicide -- Roundup weedkiller, used in farms and gardens across the U.S.-- -- is coming under more intense scrutiny following the release of a new report calling for a heightened regulatory response around its use. Critics have argued for decades that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides used around the globe, poses a serious threat to public health. Industry regulators, however, appear to have consistently overlooked their concerns. A comprehensive review of existing data released this month by Earth Open Source, an organization that uses open-source collaboration to advance sustainable food production, suggests that industry regulators in Europe have known for years that glyphosate, originally introduced by American agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in 1976, causes birth defects in the embryos of laboratory animals.

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Harvard, Vanderbilt, Spelman Exposed For Taking Part in “African Land Grab”

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 20 (News Report) - A new report raises questions about the connection of Harvard, Vanderbilt and other U.S. universities to European financial interests buying or leasing vast areas of African farmland. Called “Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa,” the report by the Oakland Institute claims farmers in Africa are being driven off their lands to make way for new industrial farming projects backed by hedge funds seeking profits and foreign countries looking for cheap food. We speak with Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of the Oakland Institute. “We have heard about the role of these private hedge funds in food speculation and speculation of food prices because they control commodities” says Mittal. “But when they start buying even the means of production, they control labor, large tracks of land, they control water, it is the kind of vertical integration of the food system we have never seen before.”

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Crops outlook gloomy

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Aljazeera - Jun. 20 (News) - Interest in long-range weather forecasts has always been high. But it is likely to intensify as weather conditions continue to threaten crops in many parts of the world including China, North America and Europe. Whilst crops in the southeast of China [pr

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Tree rings record changing snowpack, research finds

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Billings Gazette - By Brett French - Jun. 18 (News Report) - Greg Pederson sees the recent publication of his research on snowpack declines in the West as a prime opportunity to reiterate the difference between climate and weather in this record-setting wet spring. Pederson, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Bozeman, was the lead author of a paper published last week in Science magazine detailing the decline in snowpack observed by examining tree rings from the watersheds of the Columbia, Missouri and Colorado river basins dating back more than 800 years. His findings: Not only has snowpack declined compared to past climate fluctuations, but there's also been a "decoupling" of precipitation in the Colorado River basin and that of the Northern Rockies.

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Death wish: Routine use of vital antibiotics on farms threatens human health

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Jeremy Laurance - Jun. 16 (Investigative Report) - The use of modern antibiotics on British farms has risen dramatically in the past decade, fuelling the development of resistant organisms and weakening the power of human medicine to cure disease.

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Growth promoters: If you can’t convince them, sue them

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Maryn McKenna - May. 25 (News Report) - Several environmental groups filed a lawsuit today that alleges the FDA has acted unlawfully, ignoring its own statutory authority, by failing to curb growth-promoting antibiotic dosing despite decades of evidence that it stimulates the emergence of antibiotic resistance, undermining medical treatment and harming human health.

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Factory Farms Produce 100 Times More Waste Than All People In the US Combined and It's Killing Our Drinking Water |

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Jill Richardson - May. 25 (Special Report) - These are not hypothetical scenarios. Just ask Rick Dove, an ex-Marine who serves as a Riverkeeper on his beloved Neuse River in North Carolina. After retiring from the Marines, he lived his dream of becoming a small-scale commercial fisherman on the river briefly -- until enormous hog operations moved in, each producing as much waste as a town of 20,000 people, and their waste killed the fish.

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Shameful Kowtowing to the Meat Industry: 147 Congressmen Diss Family Farmers

Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Wenonah Hauter - May. 24 (Opinion) - these 147 Congressmen and women are protecting the interests of big factory farms, preventing rules that would make farming fair and help reverse the stranglehold Big Ag has on the food system.

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Pollinator decline & pesticides

Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

panna.org - May. 24 (Advocacy) - While wild pollinators like bats and bumble bees are also facing catastrophic declines, managed honey bees are the most economically important pollinators in the world. According to a recent U.N. report, of the 100 crops that provide 90% of the world's food, over 70 are pollinated by bees. In the U.S. alone, honey bees’ economic contribution is valued at over $15 billion

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"Every 30 Minutes": Crushed by Debt and Neo-Liberal Reforms, Indian Farmers Commit Suicide At Staggering Rate

Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Smita Narula, Amy Goodman - May. 11 (Interview) - A quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—an average of one suicide every 30 minutes. The crisis has ballooned with economic liberalization that has removed agricultural subsidies and opened Indian agriculture to the global market. Small farmers are often trapped in a cycle of insurmountable debt, leading many to take their lives out of sheer desperation. We speak with Smita Narula of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University Law School, co-author of a new report on farmer suicides in India.

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Soil Erosion Far Worse Than Reported In American Farmlands

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Joanna Zelman - Apr. 13 (Special Report) - If the American classic song is right and â€œthis land was made for you and me,â€* then why are we paying to have it destroyed?...

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Honeybees 'Entomb' Hives to Protect Against Pesticides, say Scientists

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Fiona Harvey - Apr. 06 (Special Report) - Honeybees are taking emergency measures to protect their hives from pesticides, in an extraordinary example of the natural world adapting swiftly to our depredations, according to a prominent bee expert. Scientists have found numerous examples of a new phenomenon – bees "entombing" or sealing up hive cells full of pollen to put them out of use, and protect the rest of the hive from their contents. The pollen stored in the sealed-up cells has been found to contain dramatically higher levels of pesticides and other potentially harmful chemicals than the pollen stored in neighbouring cells, which is used to feed growing young bees. "This is a novel finding, and very striking. The implication is that the bees are sensing [pesticides] and actually sealing it off. They are recognising that something is wrong with the pollen and encapsulating it," said Jeff Pettis,

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How Carrots Became the New Junk Food

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Fast Company - By Douglas McGray - Mar. 22 (News) - Jeff Dunn believes he can double the $1 billion baby-carrot business -- and promote healthy eating -- by marketing the vegetable like Doritos. His secret weapon? He knows every snack-marketing trick in the book.

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Corn May Be More Vulnerable to Warming, Stanford Study Shows

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Bloomberg - By Rudy Ruitenberg - Mar. 14 (News) - Corn, the world’s second-most- widely grown grain, may be more vulnerable to global warming than previously thought, based on a study led by Stanford University that examined data from field trials.

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Wisconsin State Senate Republicans Took Hundreds Of Thousands In Government Farm Subsidies

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - Mar. 09 (News Report) - At least three of the Wisconsin state Senate Republicans currently demanding that public workers sacrifice benefits, wages and even collective bargaining rights for the sake of the budget have applied for and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidies, a Huffington Post review of state and federal records shows. From 1995 through 2009, state Sens. Luther Olsen, Dale Schultz and Sheila Harsdorf all had stakes in farms that received between them more than $300,000 in taxpayer funds.

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State and municipal governments fertilize local food craze

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

hcn.org - By Nathaniel Hoffman - Mar. 08 (News Report) - Over the last 80 years, federal policy has increasingly put small farmers at a disadvantage by massively subsidizing a centralized, industrial agriculture system that produces cheap food. Activists have spent decades pushing federal reforms, such as organic standards, with incremental success. Now, a surge of state and local government policies that promote local food and small farms as engines of economic development is making waves in Washington, D.C., (see map at right). In 2008 and 2009, for example, at least 13 state legislatures passed bills encouraging the growth of farmers markets. Arizona removed barriers to selling beef and lamb at market, while New Mexico, Washington and other states made it easier for those on public assistance to buy food at farmers markets. Some states directed limited funding toward the infrastructure and promotion of such markets.

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