agriculture

Calls the Mounties — someone’s enjoying locally raised meat in rural Ontario

A couple of weeks ago in my Victual Reality column I wondered why more farm areas don't focus on growing food for local consumption, since the global commodity market had proven such an economic disaster.

I acknowledged one key problem: the collapse of local food infrastructure after 50 years of investments in stuff like grain elevators and train systems designed to haul food far, far away.

I forgot to add a factor I mentioned in an earlier column: federal regulations, designed with mega-producers in mind, are a crushing weight on small-scale artisanal operators.

Together, these two factors can deal a death blow to people's extraordinary efforts to rebuild local food networks.

An email I received yesterday from the Community Food Security Coalition's excellent listserv illustrates these points to maddening effect.

Why everyone should be allowed to love food with unrestrained glee

I spend hours at a time in the kitchen, I approach my morning coffee with a quasi-religious fervor, and the attention I grant beer and wine selection can border on the Talmudic. Am I a food snob? Diverse authorities — including my mother, a certain Grist writer, and several friends — have claimed as much. […]

What if the Midwest stopped trying to feed the world and started focusing on itself?

Is the sun setting on Midwest farming, or can it be saved by the dawn of a new model?In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a sailor contemplates the paradox of thirst amid a literal sea of water. “Water, water everywhere,” he famously laments, “nor any drop to drink.” Rural Midwesterners can likely identify with […]

The shining promise of ethanol doesn’t add up for farmers

No one can begrudge corn farmers their share of euphoria over the recent ethanol boom. Until very recently, their plight could be summed up by a bit of gallows humor I once heard from a dairy farmer: “I lose money on every gallon, so I try to make up for it on volume.” Hopes are […]

Decades after Silent Spring, pesticides remain a menace — especially to farmworkers

In 1962, Rachel Carson published her landmark Silent Spring, which documented the ravages of agricultural pesticides, particularly DDT, on wildlife. The book inspired wide outrage and helped spark the modern environmental movement. It eventually led to a (now-controversial) ban on DDT. But since then, use of other pesticides has boomed. Sign of the times? Photos: […]

Can industrial agriculture withstand climate change?

If the fossil fuels don’t getcha, the genetics will. Photo: iStockphoto In the United States, the clearest signs of climate change so far have been stern words from Al Gore and a few hotter-than-normal summers. In Greenland, by contrast, global warming has sparked a revolution — at least, when it comes to agriculture. A recent […]

Why the Hudson Insitute needs to compost its manure a little better.

Very few people are actually passionate about industrial food. Sure, people will buy rock-hard and flavorless tomatoes from the supermarket without thinking much about it, but they won't get mad because, say, there's a farmers' market down the road where someone's selling flavorful heirloom tomatoes grown without chemicals.

Alex Avery of the Hudson Institute -- funded lavishly by right-wing foundations and agribiz giants -- is a different breed altogether. Indeed, it's as though Monsanto conjured him up in a test-tube: the fellow seems to have a congenital hatred of organic food -- and a burning desire to make you hate it, too. His preferred method for achieving his goal is fear.

Take the BS he's been spreading about the recent E. coli outbreak affecting pre-washed, bagged spinach, on Gristmill and elsewhere.

The Times a bit too flowery on China’s growing rose industry

China is positioning itself to take the lead in world rose production. Government leaders hope investing in the flower industry will bring capital and jobs to southwestern China, and florists in the U.S. see it as an opportunity to obtain cheaper products, thereby increasing profits.

Workers in the burgeoning rose industry are mostly young women, earning an average of $25 per month, which the NYT article at least points out. Missing from the piece, though, is any thought to the health, labor, and environmental effects of the flower industry, or to how China's flower project could engage with fairer standards.

Latest E. coli outbreak should prompt rethink of industrial agriculture

For the ninth time since 1995, California’s Salinas Valley — the “nation’s salad bowl” — has been implicated in an E. coli scare involving salad greens. Avoid E. coli, buy L. coli. Photo: iStockphoto As I write this, no definitive explanation has emerged for the latest outbreak, this one involving pre-washed, bagged spinach. But while […]