There are some parts of the country where, between late November and sometime around February, you just can’t get anything to grow. Call it a lumen lack. During those bleak months, the sun’s weak, pasty arms don’t reach far enough up into the northern latitudes to get the plants the juice they need. I hail […]

The Farm Bill has passed the Senate, and I’m the last one who’s going to say it doesn’t make me want to cry. But despite some extremely disappointing losses — including the failure of the Dorgan-Grassley payment limitations amendment — the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition reminds us that there were some important wins, too (and yet […]

Parke Wilde’s U.S. Food Policy blog has an update on the status of the Dorgan-Grassley amendment, which would have put a $250,000/recipient cap on subsidy payments. The status: dead. The kicker: the amendment failed despite the fact that a majority of senators voted in support of it. What is this madness, you ask? Ken Cook […]

I’ve recently learned (thanks to a little birdie from Capitol Hill) that Tyson, Smithfield, and pals are on the rampage this morning, circulating memos and e-mails against two important livestock amendments to be offered today on the Farm Bill. These amendments — the Grassley competition amendment and the Tester amendment — would help make it […]

In my last post, I took a lengthy look at the role that farmers play in the livestock production system. In case you didn’t make it that far, here’s my conclusion: In their role as feed-growers and animal-raisers, farmers are an important but virtually powerless piece of the system. Wedged between big companies selling them […]

In a recent post on Grist, Tom Philpott ran down the list of problems that this year’s Farm Bill debaters have blamed, loudly and repeatedly, on subsidies: “everything from the obesity epidemic to the explosion in CAFOs in the late 1990s to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico… [to] steamrolling farmers in Mexico, […]

I have much to say on the topic of subsidies, the favorite whipping boy of farm policy reform advocates far and wide (and my personal favorite topic to bring up at parties, only slightly ahead of slaughter. Yep, I’m quite popular!). But with several work deadlines looming, I’ll have to hold off until another day. […]

OK, I admit that I was just looking for an animal body part reference for that title. I am under no illusions that this post will get to the heart of much of anything. I am not an expert on state-inspected meat processing (though if it gives me any leverage, I have been inside a […]

It’s Labor Day, the day we pay homage to the folks who brought us the weekend (among many other things). It’s a fitting moment to show some love for the labor movement, which has seen union membership decline from a high of nearly 33% of the U.S. workforce in the 1950s to a mere 12.5% […]

Thanks to Marc R. for calling my attention to the Government Accountability Office’s recent report on the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). NAIS, which first saw the light of corner offices at the USDA in 2002, flaunts a meaty goal: to identify and track the movement of all livestock animals and poultry in the United […]

… it looks like the House did at least one thing right on the Farm Bill.
It’s not huge, monetarily speaking. It’s not a Competition Title or millions more dollars for community food projects. But you may recall a few weeks back when, en route through Wyoming, I ranted about the roadblocks that USDA slaughter regulations […]

Welcome to one of Cowboyland’s greatest ironies: Unless you make direct arrangements with a farmer or rancher, it’s fairly difficult to purchase beef (or any other meat, for that matter) that has been both raised and processed in the state of Wyoming…. (For more about the good aspects of state-inspected facilities, see this article from the New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance) C&A Meats is not state-inspected, meaning that it can only process animals that ranchers will use for their own consumption, or that have been sold live to consumers and then processed after the sale…. A great many excellent articles have been written about the barriers to small- and mid-sized livestock production created by the application of existing processing and inspection standards to small processors, including this one by Rod Dreher from a 2003 issue of the National Review and this one [PDF, but worth it] by Kristi Bahrenberg Janzen from Farming Magazine…. Train and certify a greater number of food safety inspectors for mobile slaughterhouses, farmstead operations, and small-scale processing facilities, and develop reasonable and consistent standards for food safety inspections of these facilities…. Most small farmers only want them to be reasonable (for example, it makes no sense that it should be legal for someone to take a minor risk to his health by eating raw oysters, but illegal to do the same by eating a soft raw-milk cheese); simplified (regulations vary widely from state to state); and flexible (that is, taking the small farmer’s limitations into consideration).