USA Today | By Wendy Koch | September 7, 2010

By Rick Bowmer, AP NPR

"The organic strawberry farms produced higher quality fruit and that their higher quality soils may have greater microbial functional capability and resilience to stress," concludes the study led by Washington State University, published last week.

The researches tested 13 pairs of of adjacent organic and conventional fields from commercial farms in California over a two-year period. Each pair had the same soil type and the same strawberry variety planted at similar times. The strawberries were picked, transported, and stored under identical conditions.

The organic strawberries had higher levels of antioxidants, vitamin C, and total phenolics, although their phosphorus and potassium levels were lower. Their plants had less post-harvest fungal rots, and the organic soil had more micronutrients and genetic diversity. Plus, a panel of judges found the organic strawberries to be sweeter, more flavorful and better-looking.

http://www.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/Index

When corporate agribusinesses pitch a fit, we must be doing something right.

In June 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed a new rule regarding how meatpackers must treat farmers and ranchers when they buy livestock - they have to be fair. The new rule is not perfect, but it will breathe life and competition back into our livestock markets. It is the most aggressive livestock market reform to come out of Washington since the passage of the Packers and Stockyards Act itself back in 1921.

Get in on the Action: USDA gives people like you the opportunity to comment on proposed rules, and for this rule we have until November 22, 2010. You can submit your own comment here, and keep reading for suggestions on what say below. You can read the draft rule here or here [PDF], and more about the background of the issue can be found at www.cfra.org/competition. 

The Backstory: For decades, USDA has allowed meatpackers to pay family farmers and ranchers less than they pay mega-producers for the same quality hogs and cattle.  This is bald-faced discrimination and specifically against the law - premiums based on the number of animals raised violates the Packers and Stockyards Act already on the books.

Competitive markets are the foundation of America's economy, and family farmers and ranchers asking for a level playing field where the value and quality of their livestock determine price, not the volume. The packers and their allies are complaining about this new rule because they like being able to control the market and fix prices.

Suggested Comments to USDA: There are three areas where USDA’s draft rule needs improvement:

1. The rule must specifically disallow premiums based purely on volume (i.e. the more a farmer produces, the more the meatpacker pays)
2. The “unreasonable preference” section should not focus so heavily on very large-volume livestock producers at the expense of independent, small-volume livestock producers.
3. The final rule should exclude premiums based on unclear, shadowy so-called “operational efficiencies” that meatpackers claim occur within their own plants. Premiums should only be based real and verifiable differences in transactional costs.

USDA's draft rule provides a fighting chance of enforcing that law for the first time in 40 years. Be a part of that history, and submit your own comments today!

By Aubrey Streit Krug
(Editor's Note: We'd like to thank Aubrey for her work with us this summer! Her contributions to our blog have been much appreciated.)

The sheer size of the crises that we face can be overwhelming. In addition to the earthquake in Haiti, floods in Pakistan and the BP oil spill, we have chronic environmental problems like the dead zone growing in the Gulf of Mexico, tons of topsoil being lost from the Great Plains, and mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia.

Rural areas are hit hard by these environmental problems. At the same time, they’re struggling to cope with economic troubles. Populations are often (though not always) elderly as well as decreasing or growing slowly. Young people continue to migrate to urban areas. Less than 1% of the U.S. population claims farming as an occupation, and--according to the 2002 Census of Agriculture--less than 1% of those farmers are under 25 years of age. Just this month, the longest-running family farm in America went up for sale.

It can be tempting to turn away. We as individuals seem so small in comparison to these large problems. But we are individual citizens in a democracy, with the power to raise our voices against the laws and policies that contribute to environmental and economic crises. We can do something, today. By joining together in support of legislation recently introduced by Sens. Grassley and Feingold to limit farm payments, for example, we can advocate in favor of small- and mid-sized farms, whose owners often play vital roles in sustaining rural communities.

As two new collections of fiction remind us, it is at the small scale that we can face the roots of our problems. By realizing where we are and what got us here, we can begin to see a way forward.

Chris Holbrook, in Upheaval (2009), and Lydia Peelle, in Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (2009), sing the stories of what is being lost, destroyed, and wasted in rural communities. Their characters recognize that you can’t quickly heal wounds as big as a missing mountain, and you can’t just un-develop residential sprawl into the countryside. There’s no fast going back.

Holbrook and Peelle try to place us close to the problems, so we can feel them. Let me give a few examples.

In the title story of Holbrook’s book, “Upheaval,” Haskell drives a truck that carries coal from the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. He tries to understand the size of the operation he’s involved in, but it’s too big to comprehend. For instance, he “watches the boom of the dragline swing out, a football field long. It is hard to think how big a piece of equipment a dragline really is, hard to see without some other smaller piece of machinery standing near for comparison.”

It’s a risky job, and the presence of something awful--an accident, a tragedy--looms as large as the dragline’s boom in the story. But Haskell can’t put his fear into words. He can’t connect with his son, or appreciate his wife; he can respond only at the level of his body, which is tense and constantly on guard.

As the coal is mined, “Tremors rise up through the tires and frame of [Haskell’s] truck and up through his boot soles and legs, like all the ground beneath and around him is being upheaved. It is hypnotizing. One haul, a hundred tons.”

We feel the terror of being something small in the shadow of something large, incomprehensible, and unfeeling.

Similarly, in her story “Mule Killers,” Lydia Peelle brings the advent of large-scale industrial agriculture in Tennessee down to the level of individual mules. Through the stories of the narrator’s father, we hear about the goodness and usefulness of the mule Orphan Lad, who is nevertheless replaced with a tractor: big, new and dangerous.

As the mules are taken away, and “the hollow report of hooves on the truck bed” echoes across the surrounding states “and all the way out West,” we hear the door closing on an era. The collective loss of mules signals the turn to a time in agriculture when the machines--and the crises--become so big as to be unpredictable, unknowable. Bigger mistakes will be harder to fix.

This is essentially what Wendell Berry said recently regarding the oil spill in the Gulf: “We’re clearly working on too big of a scale. We all know that at the scale of our daily lives, the laws of probability give us a certain number of errors, sometimes pretty bad mistakes. But in the scale of our daily lives we can recover and go on. But the same laws apply to large-scale operations.”

By having the courage to look closely at “our daily lives” and to feel the pain in other rural lives, we can begin to understand the vexing issue of scale, and to use the democratic process to address crises that seem overwhelming.

 NPR.org, Shots: The NPR Health Blog | By Scott Hensley | August 24, 2010

 

Less than 200 big companies — including Hillandale and Wright County Egg, the firms at the center of the current recalls — supply 95 percent of the eggs in this country, the Washington Post reports.

 

Now we're seeing the recall ripple effects of the massive egg contamination in Iowa.

Moark, an egg marketer in California, said it's recalling 291,600 eggs (or 24,300 dozen) sold under the brand-names Albertsons, Yucaipa Valley, Farmer’s Gems and Mountain Dairy.

New problem? Not exactly. We checked with a Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman who called this a "sub-recall." Huh?

It turns out that Moark gets eggs from Hillandale Farms of Iowa, which recalled 170 million eggs last Friday, repackages them and sells them under a bunch of different names. So the Moark recall is really an echo of the Hillandale problems.