agriculture

E. Coli news is bad news, any way you cut it

Grim headlines for organics, as the feds are linking Natural Selection Foods (Earthbound Farm) and its prepackaged fresh organic spinach to an outbreak of E. coli in many states.

If the linkage is confirmed, I bet we'll be hearing a lot from organics skeptics (including chief skeptic Dennis Avery), who'll do their darnedest to say that organic food on the whole is a scary thing (inputs like cow manure may contain contaminants and dirt is, you know, dirty!). And we'll probably be hearing too from smaller farmers, local-is-best-ers, and back-to-the-landers, who'll say, see!: organics doesn't work well on an industrial, Earthbound-size level. And what's up with packaged spinach in the first place?

Stay tuned.

How Mexico’s iconic flatbread went industrial and lost its flavor

In a spectacle similar to the one conjured up by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, a Mexican judiciary panel handed the nation’s presidency to Felipe Calderón last week. Even The New York Times, in its circumspect way, acknowledged that the new president-elect’s narrow victory over leftist rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador involved seemingly illegal […]

The activists among us should remember that there’s plenty to do together

I hope everyone's been following the discussion on animal rights and environmentalism. I continue to be impressed with the decency and thoughtfulness of the community that's gathered here.

Frogfish said most of what needed to be said. The unit of analysis for conservationism is population; for animal rights it is the individual. If you ask me, animal rights is morally bankrupt in the absence of environmentalism -- not the other way around.

But we should all remember: parsing the logical and ethical differences is a matter for thinkers. For doers, for activists, the job is to get things done. That means rallying people around the things they agree on, not emphasizing those that divide them.

A brazen move from an agency shot through with industry players.

Cows that feed solely on pasture perform a valuable service: they transform what's inedible to us -- grass -- into a rich source of protein and other nutrients. And when such cows are raised in moderate numbers, they can actually improve the health and biodiversity of grasslands. Moreover, cows evolved to eat grass, so the pasture model is clearly the most animal-friendly way to create beef.

To me, the grass-fed concept exemplifies responsible agrarianism: it's energy efficient (it relies on no vast, petroleum-guzzling corn fields), it enhances rather than degrades the ecosystems it relies on, and it forces us to eat mindfully and in season.

If we insisted on raising all of our beef on ample pasture, every American would be able to savor the privilege of eating beef only, say, every couple of weeks -- and less during the grazing season, when cows are fattening up.

Which sounds about right to me.

Leave it to the USDA -- that hothouse of food-industry flackery -- to attempt to screw it all up.

It’s time to get serious about reforming school lunches

Playground bullies aren’t the only ones shaking down kids for their milk money. Despite lots of recent fuss about the poor quality of school-cafeteria fare — and mounting evidence of widespread diet-related maladies among kids — corporate interests are still lining up for their cut of the cash the federal government and families spend on […]

Why the late, lamented Doha round wasn’t really the answer for ag policy.

Harvesting a bit of vintage Reagan-era rhetoric, L.A. Times columnist Jonah Goldberg recently denounced what he called "welfare queens on tractors."

The right-winger's target was clear: The U.S. farm subsidy program, which doles out around $14.5 billion per year (depending on market fluctuations), mainly to large producers of corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans, and rice. As Congress opens debate on the 2007 Farm Bill -- the omnibus five-year legislation that governs agricultural support -- the subsidy program has drawn a chorus of critics.

Goldberg gets it about right when he lists the program's opponents: "Right-wing economists, left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on a political donation."

To be sure, the subsidy-haters have a point. A vast literature shows that the real beneficiaries of U.S. ag subsidies aren't farmers at all, but rather agribusiness giants. Direct government payments encourage farmers to produce as much as possible, which pushes down the prices of ag commodities.

For years now, ag subsidies have helped enable Archer Daniels Midland to buy the corn it transforms into high-fructose corn syrup at well below corn's production costs. Meat producers like Smithfield Foods use cheap corn as fodder to run their profitable -- and socially and environmentally ruinous -- feedlot operations.

As China’s exports boom, its farmland shrinks and food imports rise. Coincidence?

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek once remarked that the United States does still have a working class -- it's simply in China.

With the U.S. manufacturing base shriveling (Ford Explorer, anyone?) and imports from China booming (set to surpass a quarter trillion dollars this year), it's hard to contradict that trendy Slovenian academic.

China's manufacturing miracle means (among many other things) that even in a period of stagnant wage growth, U.S. consumers can march into Wal-Mart and fill their carts with lots and lots of stuff.

The most famous environmental impact of China's boom has to do with crude oil: As China's economy surges (it grew at an annualized 11 percent in the second quarter), it burns more and more crude, burdening the environment with greenhouse gases. While we ramble from strip mall to strip mall in SUVs stuffed with Chinese goods, Chinese factory smokestacks send plumes of black gunk into the air.

But here's another way to look at the situation: While China expands its industrial base to supply the world with everything from mops to electronics, it's cutting drastically into its farmland. Might some wag soon be moved to remark, "China does have farmers -- they're just in Brazil"?

The case for boycotting factory-farmed ‘organic’ milk

Of all the environmental gaffes the species homo sapien commits in the process of feeding itself, the practice of cramming megafauna into huge pens and plying them with corn may rank as the most imbecilic.

The excellent web site Eat Wild documents the environmental ills of confinement dairy and meat production; here are a few. Cows evolved to eat prairie grass, not grain, which makes them sick. Huge concentrations of large ravenous animals create huge concentrations of shit -- which is a critical resource for maintaining soil health in reasonable amounts, but a fetid nightmare when produced at mountainous levels. Industrial corn production requires titantic annual lashings of natural gas-based fertilizers, much of which leaks into groundwater and wreaks havoc clear down to the Gulf. And so on.

Appallingly -- though not surprisingly, given its habitual fealty to agribiz interests -- the USDA has not seen fit to demand that organic dairy production be pasture-based. The agency's organic code stipulates that cows be given "access to pasture," but its bureaucrats tend to give that rule a lackadaisical reading -- one fully exploited by Dean Foods and Aurora Organic, the dairy giants that together produce more than half of U.S. organic milk.

In response to such official laxity and corporate opportunism, the scrappy Organic Consumers Association has launched a boycott against companies that sell "organic" milk from factory-style farms.

USDA will soon decide how much pasture time organic dairy cows should get

With demand for organic milk soaring, the stakes are high in the debate over what exactly "organic milk" is -- and that debate will soon be settled, at least from a legal standpoint, by the USDA's National Organic Program.