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THIS TUESDAY, JUNE 14th! The Marxist Education Project is delighted to host the launch of Rob Wallace's new book, Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review Press). In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled […]

Social obstacles faced by the youth of San Luis are many for a small town. Since traditional ways of life have been eliminated by loss of land rights, youth are challenged by poverty, northbound drug trafficking, and alcoholism. Costilla County has the highest rates of diabetes in the state. The 2012 Census states 37.3% of […]

International Conference on Agrarian Reform La Via Campesino, The Peasant's Movement Marabá, 15 April 2016 From 13 to 17 April 2016, in Marabá, Pará, Brazil, more than 130 delegates from 28 countries around the world were brought together as part of La Vía Campesina and allied movements, as part of the International Conference on Agrarian […]

Photo by Preston Schlebusch for The New York Times  STONE RIDGE, N.Y. — Apple trees have blossomed, and soon fruit will begin emerging at Elizabeth Ryan’s orchard in the Hudson Valley. Before long, her harvest will head south to Manhattan, where Miro Uskokovic, the pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern, will use it to create an […]

Artists from South Sudan, a new country fraught with internal conflict, make a case for the power of community agriculture in their music video. As they sing, rap, and comb through fields of corn, okra, and sorghum, their message is clear: There's rich soil in Sudan, and it will improve the lives of people if they […]

“We have the wrong world view here in the West, the idea of unlimited expansion, and it just doesn’t work,” she says. “I think land-based people who generally live on a small scale know that there’s a limited good. The basic idea is that shortages are shared.” -Sylvia Rodriguez, professor emerita of anthropology at UNM Photo credit […]

Where you live should not determine how long you live. New research shows it does. Americans have enjoyed increasingly longer lives over time. Advances in medicine, a decline in fatal car accidents, and falling violent crime rates mean we are living longer. But new research shows a reversal of this trend for some. If you are […]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdY2jAJfARI] Read our blog post from yesterday for more info! Today the walkers are walking from Garrison to Wappingers Falls.

https://vimeo.com/125097034 "California Green Fire" is built on "A Fierce Green Fire" -- filmmaker Mark Kitchell's big-picture exploration of environmental activism spanning fifty years from conservation to climate change. Now we want to bring it home, to the cutting edge where movements got started and pushed the farthest. The film will tell three environmental epics: 1) […]

Walking the 200 miles from Long Island to Albany, protesters stopped at City Hall in New York City last Saturday chanting si se puede. According to Democracy Now!, the protesters are walking in support of the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act (more about this from the ACLU), asking that farm workers have the right to collective bargaining, an optional […]

  "If you have this much milk on your  hands, you're likely to make good use of it." Ireland, with its lush vibrant farmland, was once the global hub of butter production. Food comes from and for people, and dairy is embedded in the history of the place as it weathered the Middle Ages, British colonization, and […]

Hōkūleʻa, our Star of Gladness, began as a dream of reviving the legacy of exploration, courage, and ingenuity that brought the first Polynesians to the archipelago of Hawaiʻi. The canoes that brought the first Hawaiians to their island home had disappeared from earth. Cultural extinction felt dangerously close to many Hawaiians when artist Herb Kane […]

Hank Vogler spent the last 40 years building his dream ranch in the arid lands of eastern Nevada. But a plan to transfer water from ranches like his to slake the thirst of Nevada's largest city threatens his livelihood.  This sheep rancher says he won't give up without a fight.

On February 21, 2014, 49 years to the day after Malcolm X's earthly form fell to assassins' bullets in Harlem, Chokwe Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, came home to find the power out. The outage affected only his house, not any others on the block. He phoned friends for help, including an electrician, an […]

From the Center for Rural Affairs Federal crop insurance is the major farm safety net program. It is also the costliest program outside the nutrition title of the federal Farm Bill. Unlike most other Farm Bill programs, there are no limits on crop insurance subsidies and only minimal conservation requirements. This makes the program ripe […]

"Back in 2010, the city of Toronto (in Ontario, Canada) decided to launch a program that converts old unused metro buses into mobile grocery stores called Mobile Good Food Markets, and ever since, they've been traveling across the Toronto metropolitan area selling affordable fresh food. They have been especially successful (and helpful) in low income […]

Vandana Shiva is a modern day revolutionary, and for forty years has been fighting a heroic battle on behalf of humanity and the ecologically besieged natural systems that support us. But she is opposed by powerful multinational corporations invested in continuing their toxic though lucrative agricultural practices. By profiling one of the greatest activists of […]

We tend to take it for granted that nature—being basic to everything—is the place to begin when we try to understand regional economies. The given natural attributes of a region certainly do explain much about subsistence economies: why some people eat seals and caribou while others eat dates and goats; why herders in some places […]

  Emily Melvin has been selected as a finalist in the BARBRI Law Preview “ONE LAWYER CAN CHANGE THE WORLD” $10K scholarship opportunity.Only 20 future law students made it to the final round, and she was one of them. She wrote an essay about “How you hope to use your law degree to change our […]

Based in Beit Shemesh, Israel, Growing Greens is a blog by Binyamin Klempner. His posts explore Urban Agriculture, religious thought, and social justice through photos and essays.

no trespass, no access, no spray

[vimeo 126262573 w=640 h=360] Need More Acres farm owners Nathan and Michelle discuss the necessity of diversified vegetable farms and increasing food access. This is a beautiful and heart-felt little video about a family passionate about the work that they do: providing a multi-farm CSA to 35 families; organizing a community market to make more […]

I first came across David Mas Masumoto's memoir Epitaph for a Peach a few years ago, lucky enough be required to read it in a lit class. In sympathetic prose Matsumoto describes learning the hard, slow way--by trial and sometimes devastating error--how to maintain a viable business for his family's organic fussy stunningly delicious peaches. Now, whenever […]

Rick Haney, gangly and garrulous, paces in front of a congregation of government conservationists, working the room for laughs before he gets to the hard data. The U.S. Department of Agriculture soil scientist points to an aerial photograph of research plots outside his facility in Temple, Texas. “Our drones took this shot,” he says, then shakes […]

http://cdn.chinabusinessnews.com/images/1280/1450685214413981-syngenta-once-again-under-shower-of-blessing-by-chemchina.jpg If you thought Monsanto was bad, this could be even worse: Chinese chemical giant ChemChina has begun a $43 billion merger with Swiss-based seed and pesticide company Syngenta to create one of the largest chemical and GMO seed companies in the world. This proposed merger could have huge ramifications in the U.S. and across […]

Greenhorns blogger Eliza Greenman is featured on NPR, the Weather Channel and Food&Wine this week in regards to her work on #eatuglyapples! Food&Wine: Bruised and scabbed apples have more antioxidants and sugars because they've fought off natural stressors. Grocery shoppers don't generally make a beeline to the scabbed and blemished apples. But maybe they should. […]

In this month's issue of Vice magazine, Vice took a long look at one answer to that question in Jackson, Mississippi. There, in 2013, voters elected black-nationalist lawyer Chokwe Lumumba as mayor based on promises of direct democracy and cooperative enterprise. Lumumba died unexpectedly less than a year later, but the story of what he […]

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/06/26/business/26offshore.600.jpg On March 15th, the Obama administration released a draft offshore drilling plan for 2017-2022 that includes 10 lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and 3 in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska. This proposed drilling plan puts our communities, wildlife and environment in danger -- all so oil companies like Shell […]

This just in from the Organic Consumers Association newsletter: DARK Act Comeback? Everybody loves a Comeback Kid—unless that "kid" is the DARK Act. In March, the Senate voted down the DARK Act, the bill that would Deny Americans our Right to Know about GMOs. Since then, Monsanto and its front groups, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) have been […]

Can food hubs boost rural farming economies? Lyndsey Gilpin, 21 April 2016, High Country News Their idea was to use the building as a community food hub: Local farmers pay a fee to the organization to bring their food to the school building, where it’s sold wholesale at an affordable price for consumers. That way, […]

http://foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/foto.jpg March 17, 2016 Eddie and Dorothy Wise continue to live at the Deluxe Inn in the Rocky Mount area.  As I write this today, they are on the property packing and removing all of their personal belongings.  The Federal Marshals are giving them only one day to remove everything.  One has to wonder how […]

Think federal farm subsidies only help out struggling family farmers? Think again. Fifty members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans  – banking tycoon David Rockefeller Sr., Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, stockbroker Charles Schwab and dozens of other billionaires – got at least $6.3 million in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according […]

Grizedale Arts is an arts organisation based on the historic site of Lawson Park farm, above the Coniston valley in the Lake District. The organisation is a curatorial project in a continuous state of development. Our current site, Lawson Park, is run as a productive small holding and working farm house, with a multifaceted programme […]

Hey Greenhorns...What is the Future of Citrus? Have you been wondering? We're sponsoring two great events this weekend in Ojai related to this question.   Saturday 23rd April 2pm Community Rights Workshop at Oak Grove School with Javan Briggs Sunday 24th April 2pm Citrus Grafting working at Poco Farm with John Valenzuela RSVP HERE. Specifically, we're asking: All these commodity […]

This week, for In These Times, John Collins researches what the current presidential candidates have to say about agriculture-- and what he discovers might surprise you. For instance, Hilary Clinton has the most detailed proposition for supporting small farms, including mention of student debt reform. She even proposes doubling funding for the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development […]

John Collins Food, safety, modernization—all good words. But the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) President Obama signed into law in 2011—giving the Food and Drug Administration new authority to regulate how food is grown, harvested and processed (i.e. produced)—places costly burdens on the small farmers who can least afford them. What is the FSMA? Prior […]

THE EAST follows Sarah Moss, an undercover P.I infiltrating an anarchist collective, but soon finds herself torn between two worlds as falls for the groups charismatic leader and her ideals begin to change. Keep up to date on the latest news on our Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/wearetheeast

Watch the video below! Learn more about the exhibit here! Follow the amazing ripple effects of the exhibit, recent press in the Houston Chronicle and NYT, and more of the organizations work on their news page.  

While we're on the subject of oil, this past Sunday, the New York Times magazine re-ran Sebastiao Salgado's 1991 photo documentary of the burning of Saudi oil fields. And, holy crap, they are, without doubt or exaggeration, some of the most stunning photographs ever taken, highlighting both the unequivocal devastation of war and the abject threat posed by […]

On March 17th Washington-state-based independent farm worker union, the Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), began a 28-day tour from Bellingham, WA to the US-Mexico border to galvanize a boycott of Driscoll berries to be undertaken in solidarity with their contract negotiations with their employer and Driscoll-supplier Sakuma Berry. So far, they have: walked 1,090 miles visited 13 […]