Big Ag

Monsanto’s latest court triumph cloaks massive market power

At first glance, it was an open-and-shut case. In 1998, Mississippi farmer Homan McFarling bought soybean seeds with genetic traits owned by Monsanto, then as now the world’s dominant provider of genetically modified seeds — and also the biggest herbicide maker. Like all farmers who buy GM seeds, McFarling signed a contract obliging him not […]

Conservation title schemes, youth flee CAFO country, and a side of E. coli beef

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. In the business section of Sunday’s New York Times, reporter Andrew Martin shined a bright light on a USDA program called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP. Funded through the conservation title of the farm bill, EQIP was originally intended to […]

Cargill’s well-connected fertilizer unit wows Wall Street, dumps on Florida

As I wrote last week, the real winners in the ethanol boom aren’t corn growers or even ethanol makers (though the latter will do just fine). Rather, it’s the companies that make the inputs needed for growing vast quantities of corn. Photo: iStockphoto Monsanto, the world’s dominant producer of genetically modified seed traits as well […]

Seed-and-chemical giant sees its profit triple

In a gold rush, the firms that supply the gold diggers with tools — not the gold diggers themselves — make the highest and steadiest profits. That’s a platitude, but it’s also usually true. And it’s now playing out in the boom in corn-based ethanol. Don’t waste much time envying corn farmers. Sure, they’ve seen […]

Avoid burgers in Texas, Hillary gets charred for CAFO ties, and more

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. In a proper finale to an E. coli-tainted 2007, the USDA has issued a public-heath alert regarding 14,800 pounds of stolen hamburger meat down in Texas. Get this: the hot meat is “thought to be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.” By my […]

Tyson Foods chief nets $10 million — oops, no, $24 million

Update [2007-12-28 10:14:4 by Tom Philpott]:According to AP, Tyson CEO Richard Bond made total compensation of $24 million in 2007, not $9.88 million, as reported by Bloomberg. Here’s how industrial meat production works: you stuff animals into pens, feed them genetically modified, nutritionally suspect corn and soy (along with growth hormones), and force them to […]

Unlike the U.S., European governments are cutting back on agrofuel goodies

European biodiesel makers have entered a rough patch. The price for their main feedstock, rapeseed, has risen more than 50 percent since the beginning of the year. But the price of the final product, biodiesel, has plunged, because producers are churning out far more biodiesel than the market can absorb. Similar conditions hold sway among […]

No holiday cheer from the meat industry

This isn’t what you want to hear about in the wake of the holiday feast, but here goes. From a meat-industry trade journal: A new strain of swine influenza — H2N3, which belongs to the group of H2 influenza viruses that last infected humans during the 1957 pandemic, has been identified by researchers. However, this […]

The GM seed giants lumber into the veggie patch

In 2005, Monsanto bought Seminis, the world’s largest vegetable-seed company. At the time, Monsanto — which enjoys a dominant position in the global market for GM soy, corn, and cotton traits — claimed it had no imminent plans to subject veggies to genetic modification. Now I learn from the excellent new blog SeedStory, by Matthew […]