the family farm bulks up

Lon Frahm may represent the future of farming. Inside a two-story office building overshadowed by 80-foot steel grain bins, he points to a map showing the patchwork of square and circular fields that make up his operation. It covers nearly 10% of the county’s cropland, and when he climbs into his Cessna Skylane to check crops from the air, he can fly 30 miles before reaching the end of his land. At 30,600 acres, his farm is among the country’s vastest, and it yields enough corn and wheat each year to fill 4,500 semitrailer trucks. Big operations like Mr. Frahm’s, which he has spent decades building, are prospering despite the deepest farm slump since the 1980s. Years of low prices for corn, wheat and other commodities brought on by a glut of grain world-wide are driving smaller American farmers out of business.

call for film submissions for change making tool-kits

Real Food Films is calling for filmmakers to submit projects by April 1st that correspond to the themes of:

• Crafting Public Policies for Public Health: Taking on Big Soda
• Building Power with Food Workers
• Tackling Climate Change Through Food

Selected films will be included in their 2017 Organizing Toolkits, which will be jam-packed with educational materials for groups and individuals interested in working in food system reform.

what kind of farming will we have in the next century??

Seriously, we really want to know, and so do these film makers. Specifically, they’re focussing on the chicken industry, asking, if chicken is America’s favorite meat, generating more than $30 billion a year in revenue, but who benefits from this multi-billion dollar industry?

Spoiler alert! It’s not the farmers. This is a story that we hadn’t heard yet of the greed of large industrial ag companies, and it’s absolutely repulsive.

throw away the teflon, use cast iron

There have been several stories lately about the poisons of teflon and the down-right corruption from DuPont (influencing the EPA, among other agencies). There is currently a corporate lawyer battling it out with DuPont in order to get the many people affected by the manufacturing of teflon their settlement, but there’s a long way to go in terms of consumer awareness.

Starting around 1951, DuPont began using another laboratory-formed chemical known as Perfluorooctanoic (PFOA) acid, or C8 (so called because it contains eight carbon molecules), to smooth out the lumpiness of freshly manufactured Teflon. An unusually durable chemical, C8 first entered the world in 1947 and due to its nonstick and stain-resistant properties its use as a “surfactant” spread with extraordinary speed. The white, powdery compound, often said to look like Tide laundry detergent, would ultimately be used in hundreds of products including fast food wrappers, waterproof clothing, electrical cables, and pizza boxes. (DuPont used to purchase C8 from another chemical company called 3M until 2002, when the company phased it out. DuPont then started manufacturing C8 on its own at a factory in Fayetteville, North Carolina.)

The trouble was that the compound – which has since been linked to a variety of health risks including cancer, liver disease, developmental problems, and thyroid disease – escapes into the air easily. In fact, C8 was often shipped to factories pre-mixed with water to keep the dust from worker’s lungs.

mark baker’s update to his recent farm raid

This could be any small diversified farmer. Greenhorns far and wide, stay updated on this situation. Share it broadly. Make a fuss. Start a conversation.

SPREAD THIS FAR AND WIDE. SOCIAL MEDIA NEEDS TO COME TO HIS RESCUE.

rewild! escape from monomania

Rewild! Escape from Monomania

by: George Monbiot

October 17, 2015, Rural America

Most human endeavours, unless checked by public dissent, evolve into monocultures. Money seeks out a region’s comparative advantage—the field in which it competes most successfully—and promotes it to the exclusion of all else. Every landscape or seascape, if this process is loosed, performs just one function.

This greatly taxes the natural world. An aquifer might contain enough water to allow some farmers to grow alfalfa, but perhaps not all of them. A loch or bay or fjord might have room for wild salmon and a few salmon farms, but if too many cages are built, the parasites that infest them will overwhelm the wild fish. Many farmland birds can survive in a mixed landscape of pasture and arable crops, hedgerows and woodlands, but not in a boundless field of wheat or soybeans.

Some enthusiasts for rewilding see reserves of self-willed land as an exchange for featureless monocultures elsewhere. I believe that pockets of wild land—small in some places, large in others—should be accessible to everyone: no one should have to travel far to seek refuge from the ordered world…

Read on here!

for the mommies, grandmommies, someday mommies, and everyone who cares about mommies and babies

Lest we forget why we care so much about this whole sustainable ag movement… Tyronne Hayes and Penelope Jagessar Chagger on “The Toxic Baby,” or how the chemicals in our world– especially in our food– affect our unborn children.

AGRICULTURAL REFORM HAS NEVER BEEN MORE IMPORTANT.

food waste and folly

Although his jokes are goofy, he makes some very important points.

Thank you for bringing these issues to the mainstream, John Oliver.

gmo free and still doing big buisness

As you can read in the article below, Chipotle is at the top of fast food restaurants in sales, beating out KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. They are the leading the trend for sustainable fast food that we also see as Amy’s Organic opens a drive-thru and Applegate shows up at rest stops next to McDonalds.  We can applaud these environmentally conscious chains as they attempt to change where large meat comes from, but maintain healthy skepticism and demand transparency as they piggy back on a very important cultural shift.

Chipotle Boasts Another Quarter of Billion-Dollar Sales
Stephanie Strom, The Washington Post, April 21, 2015

“So-called fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle, which allow their customers to tailor their meals, and still have them ready in a flash, are booming right now, playing to consumer tastes for customization, speed and ingredients from sources that adhere to animal welfare, organic and other standards.

Sales in its stores open at least one year were up 10.4 percent in the first quarter, which ended March 31. Overall sales were up 20.4 percent to $1.09 billion, compared with $904.2 million in the same period last year. Profits jumped 47.6 percent to $122.6 million.

“We are very proud of our start to 2015, as our average sales volumes reached a record $2.5 million per restaurant,” Steve Ells, Chipotle’s co-chief executive, said in a statement.”

last week tonight with john oliver uses footage from “the sharecroppers”

Our friend Jonathan Shepard is a documentary film maker who is the mastermind behind “The Sharecroppers.” Recently, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver borrowed some of his chicken footage for their amazing piece. Check out both videos!

on decay: dental, moral, and otherwise

In delightfully unsurprising news for conspiracy theorists, a recent paper published in PLOS Medicine Journal reveals a rather crooked historical alliance between the National Institute of Dental Research and the cane and beet sugar industry.

The distillation of the story is alarmingly familiar: federal health organization caves to pressure from big ag and industry groups, turning a blind eye to risk to Americans’ health.

Thousands of internal industry documents analyzed by the paper’s authors reveal that the Sugar Industry knew as early as 1950 that sugar was a key player in dental decay. In order to prevent dentists from doing what dentists arguably do best (handing out apples on Halloween?), trade organizations attempted to deflect attention from the sugar question towards research on enzymes that reduce dental plaque and a dubious vaccine against cavities.

The study notes that a whopping “78% of a report submitted to the NIDR by the sugar industry was directly incorporated into the NIDR’s first request for research proposals” for its National Caries Program (NCP), whose purported goal was to eliminate tooth decay in America. Meanwhile, the NIDR neglected to call for research that would potentially damage sugar industry interests, and, when the agency launched the NCP, it omitted this kind of research from its priorities.

The Sugar Industry responded to the paper by calling its tactics “‘a textbook’ play from the activist agenda.”

To which we say, “Carie on!”

arkansas farmers say syngenta tainted grain supply to promote gmo

(Original photo by Bob Coleman)

At least a dozen Arkansas farmers have joined hundreds of farmers in 19 other states in almost 800 lawsuits against Swiss seed maker Syngenta over genetically modified corn seed, a case that has been widely reported in the media.

But one of the lawsuits, filed on behalf of two Newport farms, contains a previously unreported twist: an allegation that Syngenta, a global agribusiness, has engaged in a criminal conspiracy to contaminate the U.S. corn crop to force China, other nations that buy U.S. corn and U.S. farmers to accept genetically modified corn.

The suit, field by the Emerson Poynter law firm, which has offices in Little Rock and Houston, alleges that Syngenta violated the Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which is usually used to fight organized crime.

Emerson Poynter filed the class-action suit in January on behalf of Kenny Falwell and Eagle Lake Farms, farming operations in Newport. It, like at least eight other lawsuits against Syngenta over its genetically modified corn seed, was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

These lawsuits joined hundreds of other lawsuits filed by U.S. farmers since the fall against Syngenta, the Swiss developer and marketer of seeds and agricultural chemicals. To read more, CLICK HERE!

the sharecroppers

Farmers taken advantage of by Pilgrims Pride and other large poultry companies. Spread the word.

joel salatin shares his opinion with greenhorns after nyt glorifies new ag data and technology

“The demise of the small family farm has been a long time coming;” writes New York Times journalist Quentin Hardy. The solution to escaping this demise? Get big. Get REAL big, through investing heavily in expensive, mind-boggling technology in order to stay competitive in the world of corn and soy. In last week’s article, Working the Land and the Data, Midwestern farmer Kip Top was interviewed about how his implementation of the newest technology and data (drones, GMO crops, infrared cameras, GPS combines, iphone apps for irrigation, cloud computing systems and satellite imagery) has allowed him to increase his production from 700 acres in 1970 to 20,000 acres today.

Joel Salatin shared his retort with the Greenhorns:

As a puff piece for industrial agriculture, the Nov. 30 NYT Working the Land and the Data story about the 20,000 acre Indiana farm does an incredible disservice to earthworms, soil life, and the entire integrity food movement.

At the risk of sounding ungrateful, many of us think farming this way is terrifying, violent, and harmful.  The world has twice as many obese as hungry.  Frankly, we don’t want or need these bushels.  They destroy soil, create chemicalized riparian dead zones, produce nutrient deficiencies and depend on taxpayer subsidies.

To insinuate that those of us who create intricate multi-speciated bio-mimicry farms are technologically backward is not only incorrect; it’s disingenuous.  On our farm, we use computer micro-chip electric fence energizers to manage cattle so they don’t even need corn.  How about that for futuristic?  And yes, the production per acre is the same while building soil, hydrating the landscape, and sequestering carbon.

And if I don’t bow to Monsanto, I’m not using business principles?  Dear me, it is precisely because of business principles that I think Monsanto is the Devil. The real kicker in the accompanying video, of course, is the notion that the featured Tom farm is smart.  The obvious insinuation is that the rest of us aren’t smart.  Pardon me, but I’ll take the smartness of nature’s template over the contrivances of Monsanto anytime.

And by the way, my family enjoys being with me on our farm.  It’s an aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic place.  What a horrifying thought that I would need driverless tractors in order to spend more time with my family–the ultimate segregated farm.  How tragic.  Diminishing farmers indicate a weakening civilization.  And yes, farmers include backyard gardeners.

Armed with our laptops, electron microscopes, and a deep awe toward ecology and food integrity, a whole new generation of farmers is realizing that community-building diversified farms enjoy more economic, ecological, and emotional resiliency than industrial models.

 

artistic advocacy for prison reform

What do milk and jails have to do with each other? Check out this short video to find out!