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Big Ag

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    House ag chief Peterson: what, me worry about a warming planet?

    Peterson, right, with combine rep: With climate change and big diesel-guzzling combines, we can grow lots of corn!After researching my story last week about the ag lobby’s attempt to turn Waxman-Markey into a cash cow for the agrichem and ethanol industries, I assumed that Waxman would quietly make some unspeakable deal with House ag chief […]

    Tom Philpott Politics

  • Waxman-Markey, meet House Ag Committee

    House Ag Committee: Like a combine thundering through a field.By all accounts, Thursday’s House Ag Committee hearing on the Waxman-Markey climate-change legislation went as expected: angry men blustered and fulminated and generally vented spleen. (See the Wall Street Journal’s coverage here and here; Farm Policy blog’s summary; and here’s links to the testimony of the […]

    Tom Philpott Politics

  • Will Big Ag plow under Waxman-Markey?

    Waxman and Markey prepare for the ag lobby. As the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill moves forward in the House, Big Ag interest groups are circling their plows and sharpening their pitchforks. Some of the largest corporations in the agribusiness sector–including the GMO-and-herbicide giant Monsanto–are pushing to control how agriculture would fit into the bill’s […]

    Tom Philpott Politics

  • Monsanto dropped a cool $2 million on lobbying in Q1 2009

    Jolly gene giantSource: ETC Group Monsanto dominates the global market for GMO seeds like Microsoft dominates the operating-system software market.  You don’t skirt around antitrust enforcement like that without having good friends in Washinton. And to make friends, you’ve got have guys in suits working the Hill and the agencies. La Vida Locavore’s ever-enterprising Jill […]

    Tom Philpott Politics

  • What the financial collapse can teach us about the food system

    In a recent New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten published a lucid, entertaining essay on the financial collapse. Titled “The Death of Kings,” it focuses on the hedge-fund managers, stock gurus, and private-equity wizards who reaped billions from the credit bubble.Is Big Ag running the food system into the ground the same way Wall Street wrecked the […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • House ag chief Peterson: Waxman-Markey is mine, all mine

    Corn: more important than climate? I’ve been reporting on it for a while, but now it’s reaching fever pitch: Big Ag is getting downright jittery about climate change legislation. There’s no mystery about why: industrial agriculture spews out massive amounts of greenhouse gas. Any serious scheme for reckoning with climate change will deal harshly with […]

    Tom Philpott Politics

  • From bee collapse to good cheap wine, tasty morsels from around the web

    Can we pleazzzzze ban insecticides? When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web. Way to bee, manOver on Salon, Julia Scott’s got a strong piece on that stubbornly persistent mystery, bee-colony collapse. Since 2006, the nation’s conventionally kept honey bees have been undergoing large annual […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Peterson: Leave ethanol alone, or I’ll nuke Waxman-Markey

    What GHG footprint? Peterson, right, with tractor rep. House Ag committee chair Collin Peterson (D.-Minn.) has already made it clear that he’s furious that the EPA has proposed a framework for assessing the greenhouse gas footprint of ethanol. Now he’s vowing to use his clout to crush the historic Waxman-Markey climate change bill, unless Congress […]

    Tom Philpott Politics

  • Drought, fish, and our fruit-and-veg problem

    High and dryIn the United States, when people say “eat your veggies,” they are essentially urging you to take a bite out of California — or, more to the point, take a a big swig of its increasingly scarce water supply. How much do we rely on California for fruits and veg? With its rich […]

    Tom Philpott Food