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Big Ag

  • Christine MacDonald on Big Green NGOs and soy expansion in Brazil

    Cargill and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) have a long-standing relationship dating back to the 1980s. Cargill and TNC share a mutual interest in developing science-based, improved agricultural management practices that guarantee the productivity and enduring health of the ecosystem and landscape.  — From a joint Cargill/TNC document [PDF] dated February 2006 — In her new […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • The pet-food industry takes a serious look at distillers grains

    Should the mush left over after the ethanol process — known as distillers grains — be fed to farm animals? There’s been little real debate around that question, even though a) heavy use of distillers grains as cow feed has been linked to deadly E. Coli 0157H7 outbreaks; and b), the mush has been shown […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • If you can’t stand the smell, tough luck

    Duplin County, N.C. stinks. And no wonder. Its human population is just under 50,000 people, but it is also home to 2.2 million [PDF] of North Carolina’s 10 million hogs [PDF]. Last week, I went on a bus tour of Duplin County as a part of the Politics of Food Conference to see how confined […]

    Steph Larsen Food

  • How commodity grain farmers have sown the seeds of their demise

    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 field of dried soybeans ready to be combined. Although “that time of year” in corn and soybean […]

    Ariane Lotti Food

  • The Environment Report naively pushes Monsanto-related study praising rBGH

    I don’t know much about Environment Report, a non-profit producer of radio reports about, uh, the environment. But I can’t say I’m impressed by its recent piece on recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), the genetically modified "feed enhancer" for dairy cows that Monsanto recently sold to Eli Lilly. In it (transcript here), reporter Shawn Allee […]

    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

  • The GMO seed giant expects Roundup to generate $1.8 billion in profits in 2008

    Monsanto positions itself as a green company. “Using the tools of modern biology,” its website informs us, “we help farmers grow more yield sustainably so they can produce more and conserve more.” Compare that twaddle to this bit from Monsanto’s announcement on Tuesday: [Monsanto’s Chief Financial Officer Terry] Crews will indicate that Monsanto’s Roundup® and […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Everglades restoration deal could still benefit Big Sugar

    When Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced in June that the state would buy 187,000 acres of land from U.S. Sugar Corp. to “jump start” an Everglades restoration effort, environmentalists cheered visions of flowing, fresh water and pristine, untouched habitat. But that may not turn out to be exactly the case. Crist initially said he would […]

    Grist staff Technology

  • The GMO industry has been scraping by on bad science

    In 2002, a most unlikely book came out: an oversized, lushly produced, coffee-table tome on the ills of mass-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture. Grandly titled Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, the book contained stark photos of highly mechanized, monocrop farming, along with pungent, probing essays by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and other seminal thinkers of […]

    Tom Philpott Food