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agriculture

  • Thoughts on an ‘urban farm tour’ in Carrboro, N.C.

    The Farm Tour culminates at Carrboro Community Garden. Photo: Maciek Kryzystoforski What’s a farm? I don’t want to get buried in technical definitions, but I’ll take a stab at an informal one: a substantial piece of productive land. When I step out my front door in Carrboro, N.C. — where I spend part of my […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • GAO: EPA has seriously botched CAFO oversight

    Is the EPA leadership incompetent or malicious? The agency’s steady stream of oversights, lapses, and rotten decisions — which I tried to come to grips with here —  demands a reckoning. The answer appears to be a kind of toxic mix of the two: a malicious desire to please industry interests over public ones, leavened […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Milwaukee’s Growing Power founder snags a much-deserved MacArthur

    Fifteen years ago, a former professional basketball player named Will Allen made a most unlikely career move: he decided to launch a farm in a low-income neighborhood in Milwaukee. His farmhands would be un- or ill-employed neighborhood teens. Will Allen. At the time, brutal economic conditions were pushing the nation’s few remaining African-American farmers into […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Michael Pollan and Monanto’s Hugh Grant square off at Google.org forum

    What do you get when industrial agriculture’s most famous critic crosses swords with industrial agriculture’s (arguably) most powerful executive? Michael Pollan and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant squared off at a forum put on recently by google.org (video below the fold.) The topic of the discussion: how to “feed the world” as population expands over the […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • New research shows that ethanol will continue to increase the cost of wheat

    I, like most Americans, love bread. Crusty, warm, and fresh-baked bread is a carb overload I am willing to indulge in even if it means a few extra minutes of running. But the American love affair with all things baked might be at jeopardy. We all know that oil and water don’t mix, but it’s […]

    Meredith Niles Food

  • A little noted provision of the new Farm Bill

    The federal Farm Bill that was passed and signed into law in June contains a little noted provision directing the USDA to establish a framework that would facilitate participation of farmers and landowners in emerging environmental services markets. At a time when the American market system seems to be collapsing all around us, how should […]

    Thomas Dobbs Climate & Energy

  • Wired: Two top Obama science advisors are tied to Monsanto and Amgen

    I hope the executive branch’s "war on science" era ends in January. Heading into a period of climate change, tight fossil energy supplies, growing trouble with food-borne illnesses, declining health metrics, etc, we clearly don’t need a bunch of creationists and climate-change deniers knocking about the White House. At the same time, I hope we […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • Natural Hydration Council: drink more bottled water … please?

    Bottled water sales growth may be "drying up," but the bottled-water industry is veritably gushing on the PR front. Here it is investing in a high-dollar sponsorship of the upcoming presidential campaigns, joining Anheuser-Busch, EDS (which specializes in "information technology outsourcing), BBH, a big U.K. advertising firm, and others. And over here, you’ve got water […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • Small-scale slaughterhouses are vital to the health of local food economies

    In “Dispatches From the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape. —– A trailer load of chickens. Photos: Ariane Lotti In the cold and dark that is 5:30 a.m. in […]

    Ariane Lotti Food