How’re you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen… Angus? Not the cattle breed, but the 1,000-pound “farmer of the future.” Continue reading
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Category Archives: Agriculture
Silicon Valley’s next target: America’s farmers
They're building robots to siphon farm profits out of local communities and into the pockets of rich investors.
What turkey producers don’t want you to know
As Turkey Day approaches, animal lovers cringe, food safety advocates become vigilant and industrial turkey producers hope you aren’t reading the news. Continue reading
Hazardous to health GMO foods and pesticides
The danger is indisputable. Independent scientific studies exposed the hazards long ago—suppressed by Washington and US media, supporting corporate profits over human health. Continue reading
What would it take to ‘win’ the drug war?
After decades of warfare, the federal drug war has become a predictable cycle. Continue reading
The Bayer-Monsanto merger is bad news for the planet
Two new studies from Europe have found that the number of farm birds in France has crashed by a third in just 15 years, with some species being almost eradicated. The collapse in the bird population mirrors the discovery last October that over three quarters of all flying insects in Germany have vanished in just three decades. Insects are the staple food source of birds, the pollinators of fruits, and the aerators of the soil. Continue reading
America’s farmworkers face poverty, neglect, and now deportation
Up to 70 percent of the people who put food on America's tables may be undocumented.
Every decade or so, America’s mass media are surprised to discover that migrant farmworkers are being miserably paid and despicably treated by the industry that profits from their labor. Continue reading
Brave new food so safe it’s not even labeled
Almost every issue that food activists care about—unlabeled, dangerous ingredients and drug traces; crowded, polluted farms that harm workers and the environment; Agribiz cornering the food supply and destroying family farms; and animal suffering—is magnified when genetically modified (GM) or genetically engineered (GE) animals are added into the equation. Continue reading
Farmers face fields of rotted crops as Trump rounds up illegal immigrants
Valrico, Florida, is in the heart of the “Strawberry Capital of America” and the spring harvest of these popular berries is fully underway. However, the chilling effect of President Trump’s order to round up illegal immigrants, many of them farm workers, stands to do more damage to the strawberry industry than any winter deep freeze. Many undocumented farm workers, fearful of being arrested by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, are hunkered down in their trailers and manufactured homes. The region’s strawberries would rot in the fields if it were not for the largely Mexican workforce that ensures that the crop reaches consumers in short order. The fear that Trump has thrown into the farm work force has local businesses and politicians irate over the president’s detention and expulsion order. Many local residents, most of whom voted for Trump, now have voters’ remorse as the strawberry industry faces irreparable harm. Continue reading
Are cloned animals on the U.S dinner table?
It has been six years since the BBC, while reporting on a cloned cattle herd in Britain, said cloned products have been in the U.S. food supply for two years. Margaret Wittenberg, global vice-president of Whole Foods Market at the time agreed. Continue reading
Bayer-Monsanto merger is ‘five-alarm threat’ to food and farms: legal experts
White paper from two former Justice Department officials warns merger would violate antitrust laws and lessen competition
A new legal opinion penned by two former Justice Department officials bolsters warnings that the proposed merger between agroindustrial giants Bayer and Monsanto “is a five-alarm threat to our food supply and to farmers around the world.” Continue reading
Frankenfoods headed for the dinner table
Consumers, safety activists, Big Food, biotech companies and many of the US’s importing and exporting partners have been closely watching to see if the FDA would approve the genetically engineered AquAdvantage Salmon, which it did late in 2015. Of course unlabeled GE crops are eaten by millions and GE animals have been created to make human drugs largely under the public radar. Still the AquAdvantage Salmon is the first approved GE animal destined for the US dinner table. Continue reading
Thanks, McDonald’s, for your egg consciousness, but don’t stop there
Before the animal rights movement, the egg was a kind of droll and comic object—used in phrases like “laid an egg” and “egg on my face,” and thrown at buildings or public figures. The chicken itself was comic–everyone’s favorite synonym for cowardice and for gender stereotypes (“mother hen” and “hen party”). A silly, overprotective bird that lays eggs and can barely fly? What’s not to ridicule? Continue reading
Scotland bans growing GM crops
Independent evidence shows GM foods and ingredients harm human health. All nations should ban them. Continue reading
Monsanto’s land grab in Ukraine
There goes Europe’s bread basket
Long considered Europe’s “bread basket,” Ukraine’s agricultural potential is huge. It’s rich dark soil is highly valued. Ideal for growing grain. Continue reading
Elanco is the Monsanto of the animal drug industry
Big Biotech, the chilling combo of genetic engineering, Big Chem, seed giants and Big Ag, is forging ahead in its hopes of dominating global agriculture and even patenting food production. Successfully fighting GMO labeling at home, the well-funded makers of Frankenfoods are also desperate to open overseas markets for Biotech which most of the world does not want. Continue reading
Is the U.S. beef supply really free of mad cow disease?
When the first U.S. mad cow was found in late 2003, 98 percent of U.S. beef exports evaporated overnight. There was such national revulsion to cow “cannibalism” when described in the late 1990s as the presumed cause of the fatal disease, Oprah Winfrey said she would never eat a hamburger again and was promptly sued by Texas cattle producers. They lost. Continue reading
The social cost of GMOs
Ecological economists such as Herman Daly write that the more full the world becomes, the higher are the social or external costs of production. Continue reading
Five gross ways your meat is kept safe to eat
It is no secret that in the war against meat pathogens in commercial U.S. meat production, the pathogens are winning. The logical result of the tons of antibiotics that Big Meat gives livestock (not because they are sick but to fatten them) is clear: antibiotics that no longer work against antibiotic-resistant diseases like staph (MRSA), enterococci (VRE) and C. difficile. Continue reading
To bee or not to bee
A friend of mine from advertising, Richard Tucker, now working as a freelance producer, sent me a funny email the other morning with a huge bee on it. The headline reads “If I Die You Die,” which in advertising generally means, “Duck, a blood bath is coming;” or perhaps it’s a metaphor for the world of people. Richard is a very clever fellow. Continue reading
Monsanto, the TPP, and global food dominance
“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. “Control food and you control the people.” Continue reading
Syria, Egypt reveal Erdogan’s ‘hidden agenda’
The eruption of the Syrian conflict early in 2011 heralded the demise of Turkey’s officially pronounced strategy of “Zero Problems with Neighbors,” but more importantly, it revealed a “hidden agenda” in Turkish foreign policy under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Continue reading
What turkey producers won’t tell you
Thanks to humane scandals at Butterball, Aviagen Turkeys and House of Raeford, many are aware of the cruel handling in commercial turkey production. Fewer people are aware of the food additives and fast-growth methods that put both turkeys and the people who eat them at risk. Continue reading
What’s really in chicken products?
You don't want to know
Could there be anything worse for the chicken industry than this month’s outbreak of an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella that hospitalized 42 percent of everyone who got it—almost 300 in 18 states-? Yes. The government also announced that China has been cleared to process chickens for the US dinner plate and that all but one of arsenic compounds no one knew they were eating anyway have been removed from US poultry production. Thanks for that. Also this month, some food researchers have revealed the true recipe for chicken “nuggets” . . . just in time for Halloween. Continue reading
Egypt’s foreign relations on a tightrope
The internal crisis in Egypt has embroiled the country in its most critical foreign relations test since these relations were shaped by the U.S. sponsored Camp David accords and the peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Continue reading
The unsavory ways your meat and seafood is disinfected
The meat and seafood you buy probably looks and smells fine. But processors may be using unsavory drugs to retard bacterial growth and the drugs do not appear on the label. Continue reading
Sanitation, disease and humane concerns linked to US pork
You know things are bad in the pork industry when the whistleblowers aren’t animal rights activists but the government itself. In May, the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of the Inspector General exposed extreme sanitation and humane violations in 30 US swine slaughterhouses it visited and in records of 600 other US plants slaughtering pigs.[1] Continue reading
Fracking America’s food supply
Fracking—the process the oil and gas industry uses to extract fossil fuel as much as two miles below the ground—may directly impact the nation’s water supply, reduce water-based recreational and sports activity, and lead to an increase in the cost of food. Continue reading
Rutherford Institute calls on Virginia General Assembly to exempt homes and small farmers from onerous food production regulations
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.—John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, is calling on the General Assembly of Virginia to pass legislation put forth by Delegate L. Scott Lingamfelter which would exempt homeowners and small farmers from onerous regulations and state inspections which inhibit their ability to produce food for their family, friends, and neighbors. Citing the frightening trend of small food producers having their livelihood threatened through the implementation of onerous regulations generally fit for large scale agricultural and food production operations, Whitehead is calling on the legislature to protect the basic human right to raise and produce food, and to exchange that food with others for valuable goods or currency. HB1839 is currently under review by the General Assembly’s Committee on Agriculture, Chesapeake and Natural Resources. Continue reading
What new 2,4-D-resistant crops mean—going backwards
On May 23, 2012, John Rowan, national president of Vietnam Veterans of America, sent a letter to President Barack Obama requesting his “immediate assistance in staying de-regulation of Dow AgroSciences much ballyhooed 2,4-D-resistant corn seed until an environmental impact study can be conducted and its subsequent results evaluated by scientists who are not affiliated with Dow AgroScience.” Continue reading
Hunger is a ‘weapon of mass destruction,’ says Jean Ziegler
In his latest book “Mass Destruction—the Geopolitics of Hunger,” Jean Ziegler[1] talks about the current state of the world and the neoliberal politics of starvation of the poor, which has led to a crisis situation amounting to calculated murder. What we are witnessing today is the worst hunger crisis in human history is. And it is all because of human greed, colossal mismanagement for profit. Continue reading
Food for fuel, a sure way of creating a hunger crisis
Jean Ziegler, in his recently published book ‘Massive Destruction—the Geopolitics of Hunger’, is denouncing the brutal arms the neoliberal masters of the world are using in order to annihilate resistance to their senseless attempt to run the world as they see fit. Continue reading
Trump hates farmers
He tweets odes to America's small farmers, but his actions are tearing them apart.
Posted on March 29, 2019 by Jim Hightower
Have you noticed how often Donald Trump prefaces his comments and tweets with phrases like “frankly,” “to tell the truth,” and “believe me”? Continue reading →