Breaking news and developments, such as contaminated-food outbreaks, Farm Bill milestones, and how the farming community is faring around the world.

Of all of the alliances between egg and dairy, custard is one of the most interesting to me. Silky in texture, elegant in flavor, acceptable to tastes ranging from unadventurous children to the most discerning adult, it’s a perfect way to enjoy the eggs and milk you worked so hard to source from SOLE producers. […]

Editorials and op-eds about sustainable agriculture (or its opposite) from newspapers and websites big and small.

In-depth, offbeat, or thought-provoking features about aspects of SOLE food, from eating locally to farms marketing to methods of food preservation.

Posts by bloggers at both personal and nonprofit sites that you won’t want to miss.

Digest - News: Farm Bill deals, Utah milk labeling, dairy-cow Crohn’s connection

Our “free market” is bullshit : An eye-opening op-ed by a Midwestern farmer about what happened when, unable to meet demand, he leased acreage on a corn farm to grow fruits and vegetables.

… It’s not for our own good : Kansas City Star columnist Mike Hendricks gets it (free registration required); Monsanto’s anti-milk-labeling law isn’t for consumers benefit.

Last week marked the largest proportion of climate change naysayers gathered in one place since Dick Cheney walked into an empty room. Volunteers at the entrance to the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, screened people as they presented their ticket.
“Do you believe in global warming?”
“It sure is cold out today. I should have […]

Oh, Monsanto. Just look at you. You’ve got your knit cap pulled down tight over your crew cut, and your stomach is sticking out beneath your skull-and-crossbones T-shirt. You’ve been left back a few grades now — summer school doesn’t always help much, does it? — and so now you are way bigger than everyone else. You don’t have too many friends anymore. It’s tough to be the class behemoth, isn’t it? So you’ve taken to pushing other kids around on the playground and trying to take their milk money. Or, at least, to take away their ability to label their milk as rBGH-free.

Members of the Kansas Legislature have joined the esteemed lawmakers or regulators in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio who want to spare their citizens the challenge of too much information. Specifically, they want to keep consumers ignorant of whether the milk they’re drinking comes from cows not dosed with recombinant bovine growth hormone, rBGH, which is […]

A line of 7,500 trucks stretching 85 miles. That’s what it would take to haul the nearly 300 million pounds of meat and poultry products that were recalled between January 1, 1994, and November 30, 2007, in 773 separate incidents. These eye-popping numbers come from the appendix of a Congressional Research Service […]

The hopes of more than 700 California raw-milk supporters following last week’s seeming victory in Sacramento were dashed today in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. The issue of raw-milk safety and California bacteria standards — instead of being revoked — will now be taken up by a "blue ribbon" commission charged to research and recommend a […]

 
Indiana joined Pennsylvania and Ohio this week in an effort to ban the use of growth hormone-related labels on milk sold in the state. The Indiana House Committee passed HB 1300, a bill which would ban the use of “compositional” and “production-related” claims about milk. If you cannot confirm the difference in a lab or […]

This is a special edition of the Digest devoted to reactions to the Food and Drug Administration’s determination that clones and their milk are safe for consumption.
Rick Weiss reports on the USDA’s request for a "voluntary moratorium" on selling clones to allow consumers to adjust to the idea (i.e., let them forget about this week’s […]

Since goats have provided almost all of our dairy for the last year or so — thank goodness for goats! — when I read Elanor’s resolution to go goat in 2008, I felt inspired to offer tips for finding great-tasting goat dairy products.