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Big Ag

  • Umbra on organic pork

    Dear Umbra, Commercial pork production is a nasty, polluting operation and inhumane to the animals. What makes organic pork different? Simply what they are fed, or does it involve more humane and less polluting production operations? Related, I have been purchasing free-range, organic chicken for several years now. However, recently the free-range, organic chicken breasts […]

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  • For now, local politics is the way to effect ag-policy change

    Over the past few years, grassroots support has swelled for new federal farm policies — ones that promote healthy, sustainably grown food, not the interests of a few agribusiness firms. Udder madness. Photo: iStockphoto The target of much of this organizing has been the 2007 farm bill. If past farm bill debates have been the […]

    Tom Philpott Politics

  • How many are there in your state?

    Via Modeshift, check out the Factory Farm Map, which shows the location of factory farms in the U.S. by state and by county. Here in Washington we have a relatively low eight. Sorry to all you folks in Iowa, where there are 3,876. That’s a lot!

    David Roberts Food

  • An oasis amid slaughterhouses and monoculture

    When you make the three-hour drive from Des Moines to Sioux City (pop. 100,000), the heart of Woodbury County, nothing you see raises your hopes for a good dinner. All along the way, lush farmland lies smothered by what seems like one big blanket, alternately colored light and dark green: corn and soy. At a […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Umbra on feeding birds

    Dearest Umbra, Every winter I take pleasure in putting out birdseed to feed the backyard wildlife. I purchase the easily available, run-of-the-mill, found-at-my-local-hardware-store type of seed. My question is, in the big picture … am I doing more harm than good? If the feed I am using is grown conventionally, am I doing a greater […]

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  • Can’t They Just Use the Ocean?

    Schwarzenegger announces $5.9 billion plan to battle drought California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced a $5.9 billion plan to prepare for his state’s almost-certain continued drought and population boom. Taking the need to douse Big Agriculture as a given, Schwarzenegger called for construction of new reservoirs and dams — but, true to his Greeninator reputation, […]

    Grist staff Uncategorized

  • Thanks in part to that ‘green’ fuel, corn-based ethanol

    U.S. farmers planted 92.9 million acres of corn this spring, a 15 percent-plus jump from last year. If you lumped all that land together — not too hard to imagine, given that corn ag is highly concentrated in the Midwest — you’d have a monocropped land mass nearly equal in size to the state of […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Mind your (fo)odometer

    Check out a new video on food miles from The Nation: You can also check out the accompanying article here.

    Kate Sheppard Culture

  • Why we may one day bitterly regret GM crops

    Edible Media takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web. I spent the weekend in Atlanta at the first-ever U.S. Social Forum — an extremely interesting event, but not the place to go for someone needing to catch up on rest. Now I’m laid up with a sore throat, which […]

    Tom Philpott Food