USDA // Current

FDA Traceability Meeting Set for December

The Traceability Legislation will be influenced by feedback at this meeting.... more

TOP10PRODUCELLC
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6 days ago
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Traceability For All

From http://www.growingproduce.com/ American Western Fruit Grower Magazine writes... more

TOP10PRODUCELLC
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6 days ago
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USDA Prime Cloned Meat Coming To A Store Near You

To the untrained eye, Pollard Farms looks much like any other cattle ranch. Similar... more

jasonb619
added this
9 days ago
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1 comment

Secrets The Produce Aisle Keeps - Technology Induced Transparency

@kpix.dayport.com Companies Like Top 10 Produce LLC and Harvestmark are putting... more

TOP10PRODUCELLC
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15 days ago
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How About Them Apples? Is there an app for that?

Insightful musing from Tom Karst, a National Editor at The Packer, a Vance... more

TOP10PRODUCELLC
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17 days ago
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0 comments

New Ning Social Network Invites Local Farmers To Be "Nationally Known, Locally Grown"

TOP10PRODUCELLC
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24 days ago
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Produce Brand Uses Barcodes and Transparency to Promote Social Change

We limit the combined total dollar amount of item-labeled produce that any single... more

TOP10PRODUCELLC
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27 days ago
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0 comments

Saving Small Farms

Blog about how technology and consumer ratings will play a critical role in saving... more

TOP10PRODUCELLC
added this
29 days ago
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2 comments

Staging the collapse of private dairy operations: A corporate coup’

A supposedly new innovation in dairy farming is now being promoted by the USDA, and... more

MartiO
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27 days ago
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Top 10 Produce LLC plans to help small growers increase profitability by putting barcodes on produce

The Produce Traceability Initiative only addresses case-level traceability. Top 10... more

TOP10PRODUCELLC
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1 month ago
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1 comment

USDA and EPA pushing coal ash for growing crops

Just how far will they go to shill for the coal industry? I actually thought this was a joke. It's not enough with all of the pesticides, GMOs, and artificial crap in our food. Let's just add some toxic coal ash to the mix to make it taste real good. Unbelievable.

Excerpt:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency are asking farmers to use coal ash to grow their crops, despite a paucity of research on possible risks, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). USDA endorses use of coal combustion wastes by farmers "for crop production" while acknowledging uncertainty on the extent to which "toxic elements" are absorbed into produce entering the market.

This month, USDA enters the final year of a three-year partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a larger effort by the American Coal Ash Association, the Electric Power Research Institute and others to "promote appropriate increased use of" coal ash in agriculture. The implementing Memorandum of Understanding obliges USDA to generate "documentation of the effectiveness, safety and environmental benefits, including bioavailability of trace elements such as mercury, arsenic and selenium...to satisfy the concerns of producers, generators, regulators and the public."

According to EPA, agriculture annually uses more than 180,000 tons of coal ash and other coal combustion byproducts. There are no federal standards governing agricultural applications of coal ash. EPA has publicly vowed to promulgate hazardous waste rules by the end of 2009 for coal ash, one year after last December's disastrous coal ash spills from Tennessee Valley Authority sludge ponds.

"USDA should pull out of the coal ash business tomorrow morning," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. "USDA does American agriculture no favors by duping farmers into spreading hazardous wastes across their fields."

In an April 2, 2009 letter to EPA, USDA Agricultural Research Service Deputy Administrator Steven Shafer expressed "ARS interest" in exploring greater use of coal combustion wastes in crop production as a fertilizer treatment and soil amendment. His letter cites current application of coal ash in growing corn, tomatoes, alfalfa, peanuts, and other crops. While generally sanguine about coal ash use, Shafer concedes that the "long-term effects...remain a subject of research."

Nonetheless, EPA promotional materials state that EPA and "USDA support the use of" coal combustion byproducts "in appropriate soil and hydrogeologic conditions as an effective method of soil conservation and industrial material recycling."

"The public does not want its food to come from ‘industrial material recycling' any more than it wants coal-flavored cauliflower," Ruch added. "This coal ash re-use campaign is really just a multi-billion dollar backdoor subsidy to the coal industry to relieve it of the true costs of handling its toxic wastes."Just how far will they go to shill for the coal industry? I actually thought this was... more

JanforGore
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1 month ago
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29 comments

Vilsack earns moans, groans, hisses, and even boos

With a packed house, and time for only one more question, author Jeffrey Smith stepped... more

NonGMOTalk
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1 month ago
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Hispanic Farmers Fight To Sue USDA

n Texas and across the Southwest, Hispanic farmers have been fighting the Agriculture... more

atomiclegion
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1 month ago
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Expired Food in Your Grocery Store - Is it Safe to Eat?

Grocery shoppers beware: It's likely that a few of the items in your cart should have... more

tcmfan08
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1 month ago
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E. Coli: Woman Paralyzed After Severe Food Poisoning; The Unsafe System, Meat

New York Times: "Eating Ground Beef Is Still A Gamble" Stephanie Smith, a... more

atomiclegion
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1 month ago
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Anti-consumer safety quote of the week: they eat them like Skittles

Heath says, plucking one of the bulbs and popping it in his mouth...

NonGMOTalk
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1 month ago
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1 comment

National leafy greens marketing agreement unfair to organic farmers

Corporate Agribusiness Proposes Regulating Itself Instead of Stricter Governmental Food Safety Oversight

CORNUCOPIA, WI: USDA hearings begin this week on a proposal that would authorize the development of production and handling regulations for a long list of fresh vegetables, primarily leafy greens. The first of seven national hearings starts Tuesday, September 22 in Monterey, California, and then will shift to other locations across the country.

The proposed marketing agreement would allow leafy green handlers to attach a USDA-backed “food safety seal” to lettuce, spinach, cabbage and other vegetables while prohibiting most organic and local farmers selling through farmers markets, CSAs, roadside stands, and those selling directly to retailers from using the same seal.

The plan, hatched and promoted by some of the nation's largest corporate agribusinesses that distribute vegetables, is similar to a controversial California agreement that was put into place after spinach, contaminated with E. coli bacteria, sickened 199 people in 26 states and left three dead in September, 2006.

“This proposed food safety agreement will do nothing to tackle the root cause of the food safety problem, which is, in most cases, manure from confined animal feeding operations that is tainted with disease causing pathogenic bacteria,” said Will Fantle, of the Wisconsin-based farm policy group, The Cornucopia Institute.

Industry proponents pushing this will be hard pressed to demonstrate that their proposal will actually prevent food borne illness. Just days ago, on September 18, Ippolito International, a signatory to the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, recalled 1,715 cartons of spinach due to salmonella contamination.

But the proposed safety standards, which have been described as a “corporate-backed marketing ploy,” may give agribusinesses using the new food safety seal a boost and lead many consumers to assume that vegetables from industrial-scale monoculture farms, primarily in California, are safer than the leafy greens available from local growers around the country. And that has some farmers worried.

“I am concerned that organic, and small and medium sized local growers like myself, will become marketplace ‘second-class citizens' in the eyes of some consumers, by implying that my produce is less safe – when the very opposite is likely to be true,” said Tom Willey, a certified organic vegetable grower from Madera, CA.
In fact, the produce most likely to be implicated in foodborne illness outbreaks are the bags of leafy greens on supermarket shelves rather than organic produce bought directly from a farmer or when distributed to a local co-op or specialty retailer.

In addition, farmers who want to sell to handlers using the new food safety seal will likely have to implement costly record-keeping and testing protocols on their acreage. This is economically unfeasible for many small growers.

Some farmers may even have to undo decades of conservation and habitat-based improvements – such as water and shoreland stream buffers – in the attempt to isolate their crops from wildlife, that have never been proven to be the source of past contamination problems. "Isolating wildlife is a smokescreen deflecting concern away from factory farm livestock production which is demonstrated to create water, air and soil contamination," Fantle added.

The September 18th edition of the New York Times ran a disturbing cover story about widespread contamination of well water in states with high concentrations of industrial-scale livestock facilities. Contaminated water in rural areas, used for irrigation or for washing vegetables, has been implicated in past contamination incidents involving fresh vegetables.Corporate Agribusiness Proposes Regulating Itself Instead of Stricter Governmental... more

JanforGore
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1 month ago
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Another Monsanto man in a key USDA post?

Like a tractor driven by a drunk, the Obama administration keeps zigzagging on food/ag policy-sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo.

In the last couple of days, there's been a sharp turn toward the status quo. As I reported yesterday, Obama plucked Islam "Isi" Siddiqui from the nation's most powerful agrichemical lobby group and made him our chief negotiator on ag issues in global trade talks. This is a major coup for Big Ag. Ramming open foreign markets for our cheap food commodities and pricey ag inputs is critical to the industry's future profits-and perilous for global food security and the environment.

And today, Obama's Big Ag side got the best of him again. He tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, as chief of the USDA's newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

A creation of the 2008 Farm Bill, the NIFA "replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, which distributes $200 million in competitive grants and about $280 million in 'formula funding' to land-grant universities," Science blog reports.

Science continues:

The Farm Bill adds another $106 million annually of competitive funding for research into organic farming, biomass, and fruits and vegetables. It also calls for a "distinguished scientist" to be appointed for a 6-year term as director.

So this is a critical post. If the sustainable farming movement is going to scale up and really start providing a large portion of the nation's calories-and deliver on its potentially huge environmental promises-than we're going to need a significant commitment of federal research dollars.

And what are we getting with the appointment of Beachy? The Danforth Plant Science Center, nestled in Monsanto's St. Louis home town, is essentially that company's NGO research and PR arm. According to its website, the center "was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri."

Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant sits on the center's board of trustees, along with execs from defense giant McDonnell Douglas and pharma titan Merck. Another notable board member is Alfonso Romo, a Mexican magnate who cashed in big during his country's notoriously corrupt privatization /liberalization bonanza in the early '90s.

Romo used his connections to build a company called Seminis into the globe's biggest vegetable-seed concern, with dreams (as yet unrealized) of loads of new GMO veggie varieties. Monsanto bought Seminis in 2005. Here's a revealing Wall Street Journal profile of Romo from 1999; and here's what I wrote about him and the Monsanto/Seminis tie up back in 2005. (Interesting tidbit: Romo claims credit for innovating those insipid and ubiquitous "baby carrots"; and for reducing the spiciness of jalepeno peppers.)

On its short list of "partners" we find several research-oriented universities and one corporation: Monsanto. In the Danforth Center's 2007 annual report (PDF), Monsanto is mentioned no fewer than ten times funding this or that project.

So essentially, the public face of Monsanto's research efforts now has his fingers on the USDA's research purse strings. Score a big one for agribusiness!Like a tractor driven by a drunk, the Obama administration keeps zigzagging on food/ag... more

JanforGore
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1 month ago
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2 comments

Sustainable Cinema:The World According To Monsanto

Questions about what Monsanto and other chemical companies are doing to your food and... more

JanforGore
added this
3 months ago
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2 comments

Tell the USDA that GMOs and nanotech are not organic

Destroying our food to serve the corporate benefactors who fill their campaign coffers. Is our biodiversity and health worth that?
___
One reason consumers shop for things that are certified organic is to avoid the ubiquitous and unlabeled genetically engineered and nanotech products that have filled stores in recent years.

After so many years of beating back attempts to contaminate organic with untested technologies, it is very discouraging to learn that the USDA under Obama, just like under Clinton and Bush, is still trying to help industry destroy organic.

A recent report issued by the USDA Foreign Agriculture Information Network, The Unexplored Potential of Organic-Biotech Production, argues "Governments should change their regulations to allow producers to gain organic certification for biotech crops grown with organic methods."

The National Organic Standards Board has been considering an official ban on nanotechnology in organic, but feels stymied by their concern that “Under the current definition, most nanotechnology would not fall into the category of excluded methods.”

Genetically modified organisms are not safe. They have been linked to thousands of toxic and allergenic reactions, thousands of sick, sterile, and dead livestock, and damage to virtually every organ and system studied in lab animals.

Nanotechnology is also very dangerous. Early scientific evidence indicates that some nanomaterials produce free radicals which destroy or mutate DNA and can cause damage to the liver and kidneys.

Every day, new evidence of the dangers of nanotechnology emerge:

* Workplace nanoparticle exposure was linked to seven cases of serious and progressive lung disease in China – including two patient deaths.

* Nanoparticles present in a chemical found in sunscreens - titanium dioxide - are being studies for their connection to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Please use the form below to tell the USDA that you (1) oppose their cynical attempt to promote genetic engineering as potentially organic and (2) want the National Organic Standards Board to take a strong stand against the use of nanotechnology in organic.Destroying our food to serve the corporate benefactors who fill their campaign... more

JanforGore
added this
3 months ago
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3 comments

tagged w/ USDA

FDA Traceability Meeting Set for December

Traceability For All

USDA Prime Cloned Meat Coming To A Store Near You

Secrets The Produce Aisle Keeps - Technology Induced Transparency

How About Them Apples? Is there an app for that?

New Ning Social Network Invites Local Farmers To Be "Nationally Known, Locally Grown"

Produce Brand Uses Barcodes and Transparency to Promote Social Change

Saving Small Farms

Staging the collapse of private dairy operations: A corporate coup’

Top 10 Produce LLC plans to help small growers increase profitability by putting barcodes on produce

USDA and EPA pushing coal ash for growing crops

Vilsack earns moans, groans, hisses, and even boos

Hispanic Farmers Fight To Sue USDA

Expired Food in Your Grocery Store - Is it Safe to Eat?

E. Coli: Woman Paralyzed After Severe Food Poisoning; The Unsafe System, Meat

Anti-consumer safety quote of the week: they eat them like Skittles

National leafy greens marketing agreement unfair to organic farmers

Another Monsanto man in a key USDA post?

Sustainable Cinema:The World According To Monsanto

Tell the USDA that GMOs and nanotech are not organic

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