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ENSSER Comments on the Retraction of the Séralini et al. 2012 Study Journal's retraction of rat feeding paper is a travesty of science and looks like a bow to industry Elsevier's journal Food and Chemical Toxicology has retracted the paper by Prof. Gilles-Eric Séralini's group which found severe toxic effects (including liver congestions and necrosis […]

By Lindsey Rebhan The agricultural landscape in the U.S. is at another turning point in history. The number of people who lived on farms peaked in 1935, 54% of the nation’s citizens lived on 6.8 million farms. Today, farmers make up less than 1% of the population. Despite this historical move away from farming, we […]

http://livinglands.co.za/living-lands-at-the-thicket-forum-2013/ making decisions from a landscape perspective.

Rural Punk Magazine Call Out For Submissions Hey You! Rural Punk! We are creating a magazine just for us, the rural punks, back to the land skids, backwoods anarchists, etc! The Country Grind is a smokin’ new quarterly magazine specifically for those folks who have ran away from the cities in search of a simpler, saner, […]

How You Pay Farmers to Watch Their Crop Shrivel Up and Die by Laird Townsend for Mother Jones The federal crop insurance program puts farmers in a real bind. And as climate change intensifies, it's only getting worse. In 2011, Eric Herm's cantaloupes exploded. A fourth-generation cotton farmer in West Texas, Herm was experimenting with […]

Women Taking Over Farms, Learning the Lay of the Land By CORRIE MACLAGGAN Published: November 14, 2013 AMARILLO — DeDe Cummins’s family has farmed in the Texas Panhandle for a century, but no one expected her to have any interest in the work. “I was a girl,” said Ms. Cummins, 53, a high school special […]

Why the Climate Corporation Sold Itself to Monsanto Posted by Michael Specter For this week’s issue of the magazine, I wrote about the Climate Corporation, a company that is trying to deploy a vast and growing trove of data to help farmers cope with the increasingly severe fluctuations in weather caused by climate change, in […]

Farm Hack by Courtney White, originally published by The carbon pilgrim  | NOV 1, 2013 Welcome to the virtual coffee shop for agrarians! Pull up a laptop and join the conversation. Do you have a farming issue on your mind, or maybe a tool design that you’d like to share, a crop problem that needs to be solved, […]

“Greenhorns”: California couple learns farm life running local CSA farm By Polly Keary, Editor Andrew Ide, 27, has a degree in philosophy and theology. His wife Micha, 29, has a degree in anthropology and part of another in interior design. Both have experience in the California corporate world. None of that knowledge is doing them […]

To Market, To Market, No More By Rachel Wharton, for the New York Times CHANGEWATER, N.J. — As he pushed a manual weeder through an inch-tall row of fall cilantro, Bill Maxwell ticked off a list of the types of people who make good vegetable farmers: worriers, workaholics, obsessive followers of the weather, those able […]

Banksy: Think Twice about What You Eat By Twilight Greenaway on October 17, 2013 Few contemporary artists have been the subject of quite so many rumors as Banksy. Depending on what you believe, the anonymous, larger-than-life British graffiti artist is not one man, but a collective of people. He participates in social media–or not. His identity […]

Hay. Beautiful. Farmers in Transylvania have created a landscape of flower-filled hay meadows. Can they endure? By Adam Nicolson Photograph by Rena Effendi You can’t help but smile as you walk in early summer through the grass-growing valleys of Transylvania. They ooze a kind of sweet-smelling well-being, largely because these valleys in the Carpathian Mountains […]

Let's not lose this powerful resource!  Visit their kickstarter page and chip in.  2 Days to go! Check out some of their great work at civileats.com if you're not convinced. [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/708969873/civil-eats-food-policy-news-and-commentary-with-bi width=480] Founded in January 2009, Civil Eats is a community resource that brings together over 100 contributors as active participants in the evolving […]

Hacking the Fields: Crowdsourcing DIY Tools for Sustainable Farming In the brave new world of farm technology, communities are inventing new tools and cutting out Big Ag. For some farmers, the fate of a tractor or combine can make or break an operation. But with their high price tag and narrow application, these massive tools […]

President says young farmers need land Helping young farmers to access land is the greatest challenge facing modern agriculture, President Michael D Higgins said at the opening of the National Ploughing Championships in Ratheniska, Co Laois, yesterday. He said Irish farming had changed “profoundly” since the championships were last held in Ratheniska in 1943, and […]

Keep Farmland for Farmers By LINDSEY LUSHER SHUTE and BENJAMIN SHUTE CLERMONT, N.Y. — WHEN we went looking in upstate New York for a home for our farm, we feared competition from deep-pocketed developers, a new subdivision or a big-box store. These turned out to be the least of our problems. Though the farms best […]

Taylor Farms, Big Food Supplier, Grapples With Frequent Recalls By STEPHANIE STROM Taylor Farms, the large vegetable producer whose salad mix is being investigated in connection with an outbreak of illness involving hundreds of people in 22 states, has had an unusual number of voluntary recalls for potentially tainted products in the last three years. […]

good work by the AP! Selling Farms Sometimes Calls for Creative DealsALBANY, N.Y. September 1, 2013 (AP)By MICHAEL HILL Associated Press After four decades of farming, Kevin Carley was ready to pass along his dairy operation in central New York. And his son-in-law was eager to take charge. But simply selling operating farms — pricey […]

A pleasure to read.  And in other VSF news, cargo wholesale orders went out yesterdayI If you have a place for us to mail flyers about the sail barge please send your mailing address to Cara @thegreenhorns.net There is much to report since my last post here three weeks ago.  Since our first spaghetti dinner […]

a failure to do life-cycle analysis of treating all carbon as a fuel! Trash Into Gas, Efficiently? An Army Test May Tell By PAUL TULLIS There is an indisputable elegance to the idea of transforming garbage into fuel, of turning icky, smelly detritus into something valuable. But big drawbacks have prevented the wholesale adoption of […]

Check out this article about the toxicity of Round-Up. And two responses: Rodale vs. Monsanto

Despite Drop in Commodity Prices, Farmland Values Rise By PAUL SULLIVAN DAN LINDSTROM remembers looking at a piece of Nebraska farmland six or seven years ago that cost $3,300 an acre. Raised on a farm, he ran the numbers with his brother who is farming the family land and concluded that it was too expensive. […]

Not All Industrial Food Is Evil By MARK BITTMAN I’ve long wondered how producing a decent ingredient, one that you can buy in any supermarket, really happens. Take canned tomatoes, of which I probably use 100 pounds a year. It costs $2 to $3 a pound to buy hard, tasteless, “fresh” plum tomatoes, but only […]

Always a good thing. Can-do: Grange shows how to preserve nature's bounty by Mike Lauterborn Monday, August 12, 2013 for the Fairfield Citizen With a can-do attitude and an interest in preserving the bounty of the harvest, a group gathered Saturday at the historic Greenfield Hill Grange to learn about canning and preserving homegrown fruits and vegetables. […]

Baking Bread for a Sustainable Future by Chris Riedy, 2 August 2013. It’s raining lightly in Oslo as our procession makes its way past the gleaming white of the Opera House, jutting like a glacier over Oslo Fjord. I am following an artist, Eva Bakkeslett, on a strange journey to a kind of guerilla bakehouse. Colleagues […]

Farm Bill out of touch with Rural Americans by The Center for Rural Affairs, 26 July 2013 The US House of Representatives’ farm bill is out of touch with rural America in its disregard for protecting the small town and rural way of life. If and when a conference committee meets to produce a final […]

published Jul. 10, 2013, for Harvest Public Media. While the farming community continues to age fewer young people are filling the ranks, prompting the question: Do young people even want to farm anymore? The quick answer is yes, just not in the same numbers as they used to. And surveys indicate many of them don’t […]

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) by James Bamford The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east […]

via the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund The History of Cooperatives in the Black Community   And Other Updates on the Federation's Website  ATLANTA....We now have on our website information about the history of cooperatives in America's Black community, thanks to the work of scholar Jessica Nembhard. Please go the following link to read […]

A great piece by greenhorns ally Kelsey Jones-Casey, an Independent Researcher and Consultant at Isthmus & Strait whose work focuses on the intersections between land rights, sustainable livelihoods and social equity. I disdain flying for countless reasons:  the armrest wars, flight delays, and cold feet in the draft. But a small part of my people-loving […]

An encouraging piece from the New York Times Strong Support for Labeling Modified Foods By Allison Kopicki, Published: July 27, 2013 Americans overwhelmingly support labeling foods that have been genetically modified or engineered, according to a New York Times poll conducted this year, with 93 percent of respondents saying that foods containing such ingredients should […]

In Conversation with Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a Young Farmer and Activist I first met Severine von Tscharner Fleming when she was a student at UC Berkeley. Her bubbling, nay BOILING energy was a pleasant surprise for me. This wasn’t some idealistic naïve college student nonsense: Severine was already at that point a killer organizer, […]

Millions Against Monsanto: On the Road to Victory By Ronnie Cummins “The harder they come the harder they fall, one and all.” —Jimmy Cliff, reggae classic After enjoying a year of maximum profits, record stock prices, the defeat of a major GMO labeling campaign in California, pro-industry court decisions, and a formidable display of political […]

Our Coming Food Crisis By Gary Paul Nabhan Published: July 21, 2013 in the New York Times TUCSON, Ariz. — THIS summer the tiny town of Furnace Creek, Calif., may once again grace the nation’s front pages. Situated in Death Valley, it last made news in 1913, when it set the record for the world’s […]

Small Farms Quarterly As the new farmer editor I invite anyone who is located in the Northeast (Maine-Pennsylvania & points east) to submit an article. These can be focused on beginning farmers you work with, or yourself as a beginning farmer, with a story to tell about an innovation in production, marketing, new varieties, use […]

The Gravity of Paper The other day I visited an astounding library of forgotten paper. Located in San Francisco, in a large utilitarian room in a drab building, the Prelinger Library is an electrifying planetary power spot. Sparks of inspiration, adoration, amazement, and love issue from between the towering stacks of paper and tapes. While […]

Farms of the Future Will Run on Robots and Drones By Taylor Dobbs on Tue, 09 Jul 2013 On a sunny day in an otherwise rain-soaked May, Forrest Watson, dirt caked on his work boots, kneels in the middle of his uncle’s cornfield and points at one of the thousands of knee-high stalks. “This one,” […]

Rosie the Robot Won't Serve Your Food, But She'll Pick It -Rachel Estabrook, NPR, 26 June 2013. From manufacturing to cupcake sales, companies are finding that machines can often do the job just as well, or better, than humans. But some tasks – like picking and tending to fruit and vegetable crops – have remained […]

news from Shumacher Center for a New Economics On a shelf in the Library of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics sits a small wooden box with worn leather handle—13 inches by 8 inches by 2 inches. It opens to reveal the parts of an apparatus for spinning cotton. Govindra Deshpande presented this traveling […]