The Brooklyn Rescue Mission Farm’s success may be its undoing - the land is becoming so desirable that they worry about losing their site. Here is a link to their petition to local officials, asking them to help save the farm. Watch the video below that we did with the wonderful folks who run the […]

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Many food safety groups are hailing passage of Rep. John Dingell’s Food Safety Enhancement Act, HR 2749, citing it as evidence that the U.S. is getting serious about food safety, as this article in the New York Times attests. Meanwhile small farmers are concerned that the requirements for large producers would place undue burdens on […]

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According to the Food Poisoning Journal, the controversial proposed Food Safety Enhancement Act introduced by Michigan Representative John Dingell went down to defeat today in the House of Representatives when it failed to achieve the required 2/3 majority by seven votes. Dingell had reportedly worked with Republican Rep. Joe Barton on a bi-partisan effort to […]

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Just as the Congressional Budget Office is supposed to take the politics out of analyzing legislation, the mission of CAST, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, is to give citizens and legisators the straight scoop on issues such as food safety. At a briefing session this morning that I attended by telephone hookup, William […]

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The Michigan State University Museum has posted training materials for the curriculum “Food, Farming and Community.” The curriculum is divided into six lessons, with downloadable facilitator guides and PowerPoints. (The PowerPoints are rudimentary at best and will benefit from having you break the material into more slides, while adding images to engage your audience.)
Lessons are […]

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Click here to learn more about MSU’s popular Organic Farmer Training Program that begins March 1 and runs through November 19, 2010. Applications are being accepted now and will be reviewed beginning September 1.
The course requires a five-day-a-week commitment. Students help manage and run the 10-acre Student Organic Farm (SOF) on campus, including the passive […]

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Wired magazine recently ran a feature on a Silicon Valley experiment called FarmsReach that uses the web to tie restaurants to local growers. The demonstration effort has created a suite of applications that use the Internet to cut out the middleman, allowing restaurant chefs to work with local growers to ensure a steady supply of […]

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John Perkins “confesses” that hiswork with the World Bank oftenended up leaving countries in worse shape than before

A recent article in Investopedia highlights the dangers inherent in hijacking the sustainable agriculture movement so that it becomes nothing more than a buzzword for building the next economic bubble on top of Big Farma. In the article, […]

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The San Francisco Chronicle reports that farmers in California are tearing out hedges of fennel and cilantro that organic growers use around their fields to to repel harmful insects. Why? Food safety. The companies that contract for their produce demand “sterile buffers” instead.
The article goes on to list other demands the food giants are making […]

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Secretary of Agricultural Tom Vilsack held a session of his Rural Tour at the Country Mill farm owned by the Tennes family of Charlotte, MI. Accompanied by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Rep. Mark Schauer […]

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