agriculture
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The American Farm Bureau goes all in
Check out the pitch on agribiz lobbying group American Farm Bureau’s (AFB) new anti-climate bill website: Activists claim there will be droughts, floods, loss of species, and more, if the Senate does not pass the Climate Change bill. But their bill wouldn’t even help the climate … The fact is politics is driving the need […]
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Can you taste the fuels in your food?
Amanda Little on the farm. If you pinned a map of the United States to a dartboard, Kansas would be the bull’s-eye. Smack dab in the center of the country, the Sunflower State is one of America’s most productive agricultural hotbeds — the fifth-biggest producer of crops and livestock in the country. More than 90 […]
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Pollan shoots down organic myths at Grist event
Michael Pollan (left) and Tom Philpott talk food.Celebrated food and ag author Michael Pollan debunked some myths about organic agriculture Tuesday night at a Grist event in San Francisco, in a conversation with Grist food writer Tom Philpott and the audience. In response to a question about whether we can really feed the world without […]
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The chemical treadmill breaks down and the superweeds did it
Tom Philpott has been tracking the rise of so-called “superweeds” — i.e. herbicide-resistant weeds — for a while now. He’s talked about the chemical treadmill — “the situation wherein weeds and other pests develop resistance to poisons, demanding ever higher doses of old poisons and constant development of novel ones.” Due in part to its […]
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Can the USDA really keep our food safe?
Having read and listened to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s attempts at ground beef-related damage control in the wake of the recent food safety revelations, I’m left to wonder if the USDA simply needs to get out of the food safety business entirely. Vilsack himself — in a Minnesota NPR radio interview where he defended the […]
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Warning: This product may cause sickness, paralysis, and death
It’s hard to draw any other conclusion from Michael Moss’s New York Times blockbuster investigative piece on E. coli in industrial beef, which is centered on the plight of Stephanie Smith, a young dance instructor left comatose, near death and now paralyzed from eating a single Cargill hamburger. Of course, a “single hamburger” can include […]
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Big Pork and Sen. Grassley: the Danes want you to know your hogs don’t need endless antibiotics
Must we be dosed daily with antobiotics? According to the meat industry, the debate over legislation pending in the House that would ban the use of sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics comes down to a simple “fact”: hog-farming on any scale without sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics is impossible. The National Pork Producers Council says so. The […]
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Big Ag on climate change: “What, me worry?”
Once again, topics covered at length in the pixels of Grist are slowly percolating out into the wider media world. Newsweek over the weekend posted an article by Jeneen Interlandi about the grave effects of climate change on agriculture, summed up as the triple threat of “droughts, bugs and big storms.” And once again, we […]
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Big Ag places a foot soldier at the U.S. Trade Office–but loses a GMO court battle
Agribiz: flying high … or coming down? If you run a globe-spanning, U.S.-centered agribusiness firm, you’re probably not sure whether to cry in your Krug or toast with it this week.* The bad news for the GMO/fertilizer/pesticide set: A federal court in San Francisco rebuked the USDA for greenlighting genetically modified sugar beets without rigorous […]
