Hog CAFOs marching north: After fouling parts of Iowa with the spoils of hog farming (stench, contaminated water), the hog industry is looking north to Wisconsin. Proximity to packing plants is one reason; a Wisconsin law that permits CAFOs of up to 2,499 animals with almost no state monitoring is another. The main […]

Unintentional "pharming" : University of Minnesota researchers have found that food crops grown in soil nourished with antibiotic-laced animal manure (such as waste from a hog CAFO) will store the antibiotics throughout the plant. Ironically, organic farmers are most dependent on animal manure as a source of crop nutrition. (Science Daily)
123 not for me: OCA […]

The Digest trawls the Web for tasty news, features, op-eds and blog posts — from Farm Bill updates to backyard chickens, transgenic foods, E. coli recalls, and sustainable fish. No extra charge for the puns.

The ethanol boom is inspiring some surprising behavior in the food and farming community. Philip Brasher, the Des Moines Register’s Washington Correspondent, wrote about pushback from the food and drink industry over ethanol in Thursday’s newspaper. The article illustrates how the ethanol boom is leading to some hypocritical demands and Machiavellian strategies.
Let’s start with […]

Pub Brief summary (Pub) Brief summary (Pub) Brief summary (Pub) Brief summary (Pub) Brief summary (Pub) News Michigan fights manure tsunami: Michigan has introduced bills to cut down factory farm pollution. Concentrated animal feeding operations in the state spread more than 4 billion pounds of untreated manure on farm fields each year — animal feces and urine laced with hundreds of toxic chemicals and potentially deadly pathogens — because the state Legislature in the 1990s made farms exempt from most environmental laws…. (New York Times) Features The Monopoly game: Tom Philpott on how, like most of the orange juice it produces, the U.S. food system is highly concentrated — and what that seemingly unstoppable trend is doing to small farmers in both the meat and vegetable industries.

Hogging the issues: Yay for independent media! The Independent Weekly of Research Triangle, NC, had a great cover feature package on Smithfield last week that we missed. The “Big Pig” series examined Smithfield’s anti-union labor practices, worker safety, waste management, potential monopoly status, political […]

“Perfect steak all over again”: Daily Show correspondent Rob Riggle hosted a segment on cloned meat a few nights ago, complete with bizarre-o appearances by the CEO of cloning leader ViaGen and Adam Eidinger from “Big Eco,” aka the Organic Consumers Association. We love the awesome animation of the “natural” process of bovine duplication. Warning: […]

Burger King announced today it will be moving to cage-free eggs and pork from cage-free sows. It is also going to make an effort to buy from poultry suppliers that use gas, known as “controlled atmospheric stunning,” instead of electric shocks for slaughtering chickens. The New York Times article doesn’t go into it, but the […]

Possible pet food culprit: Rat poison has been found in the tainted pet food that killed several animals and sparked a nationwide recall. Frankly, we’re surprised they were bothering to poison the rats, instead of grinding them up into pet food. USA Today Whoops, breaking news has it that the rodenticide — which is […]

Bravo to Wolfgang Puck!: The L.A. restauranteur is taking foie gras, battery eggs, and meat from caged animals off the menu at all of his 14 fine-dining restaurants, 82 casual cafes, and his packaged food business. He’ll also only sell seafood from certified sustainable fisheries, and will incorporate even more organic and local produce. San […]

Brace yourselves, it’s link-overload Wednesday!
Faith & Drugs Administration: The Center for Food Safety has blasted the FDA’s risk assessment of the safety of food from cloned animals because it used data that was “selectively reported to fit predetermined conclusions” and relied heavily on unpublished data from two cloning companies. “Any safety conclusions are based more […]

The Prairie Star reported yesterday that Congress is considering amending the Superfund Law to exclude livestock manure from being considered hazardous waste. Several politicians — including Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), chair of the House agriculture committee — are quoted as bloviating about how if this doesn’t pass, small family farms could be put out […]

Horizon Organic (the largest organic milk producer in the U.S.) today announced it had published a new set of guidelines governing “Standards of Care” on its company-owned farms.
Under fire from the Cornucopia Institute, a family farm watchdog group, and others for keeping cows in feedlots — and even going so far as to fake their […]

There’s something seriously rotten in the state of the Food and Drug Administration.
Instead of concentrating on stopping food-borne illness by upping inspections at the largest culprits, it’s encouraging growers big and small to turn their fields into animal-free quarantine zones. Instead of antagonizing supermarket and restaurant chains by ID’ing where contaminated products were sold, the […]

Hoofbeats of the food apocalypse: A mysterious plague is killing off U.S. honeybees, threatening to disrupt pollination of a range of crops. Affected hives are often empty except for the queen and a few bees, with no sign as to what happened. Fact nugget: There are rent-a-bee services? Reuters
Norway to the rescue: Norway is building […]