Organic and Sustainable Agriculture News

Don’t look past Maine’s variety of cranberry Portland Press Herald - 11/11/2009. By Brooke Dojny – Scarlet-hued and glossy, cranberries are our most beautiful fruit. Native to the New World, cranberries were harvested by Maine Indian tribes and later by European settlers who established a small commercial cranberry industry in the state in the early 1900s. The industry went into decline, but was reborn around 1989, and now upwards of 40 farms are growing the tart scarlet fruits in bogs, most of which are located in Down East Washington County. The fight over the future of food Reuters - 11/10/2009. By Claudia Parsons, Russell Blinch and Svetlana Kovalyova – New York/Washington/Milan: – At first glance, Giuseppe Oglio's farm near Milan looks like it's suffering from neglect. Weeds run rampant amid the rice fields and clover grows unchecked around his millet crop. Oglio, a third generation farmer eschews modern farming techniques – chemicals, fertilizers, heavy machinery – in favor of a purely natural approach. It is not just ecological, he says, but profitable, and he believes his system can be replicated in starving regions of the globe. FDA wants to ‘sanitize’ raw oysters Washington Post - 11/10/2009. By Lyndsey Layton – Glistening oysters cradled on beds of ice have provoked a political battle, with fishing industries along the Gulf Coast and their allies in Congress pitted against food safety officials in the Obama administration, who are determined to sanitize raw oysters. The fight is over whether the government should require that Gulf Coast oysters headed for raw bars around the country first be treated to kill vibrio vulnificus, a bacterium naturally found in oysters harvested from warm waters. Good food nation: Researchers think America’s obesity epidemic can be reversed via ‘foodsheds’ Physorg.com - 11/10/2009. By Peter Dizikes – Obesity is widespread due to our national-scale system of food production and distribution, which surrounds children – especially lower-income children – with high-calorie products. “The problem lies not just in a child, but the whole environment around a child,” says Albright. “To end obesity, we need to produce healthier, more accessible, more affordable food.” While scientists fight over BPA studies, Congress could just act Grist - 11/9/2009. By Tom Laskawy – Joining Tom Philpott on the anti-BPA bandwagon, the New York Times columnist Nick Kristof had an op-ed Sunday detailing the mounting evidence against the hormone disrupting chemical. One comment in particular summed up the debate nicely: “When you have 92 percent of the American population exposed to a chemical, this is not one where you want to be wrong,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “Are we going to quibble over individual rodent studies, or are we going to act?” Red deer that escaped from Levant farm may threaten whitetails Bangor Daily News - 11/7/2009. By John Holyoke – Levant: Elwood Mason began his farming career at the age of 7½, milking cows on the family farm. Unfortunately for Mason – and potentially for the native white-tailed deer that live in Maine – keeping his herd of almost 200 red deer in their fenced Levant pastures has proved to be a bit of a problem. Sustainability: aspiring to use only fruits of labor on the farm Kennebec Journal - 11/6/2009. By Denis Thoet – I love words. I love our language. I especially love the word "sustainable." Environmentalists use the word often. Even Monsanto, their nemesis, uses the word to describe itself in National Public Television ads. Very funny. How do you define it? Our Oxford American Dictionary is not that helpful: "Sustain: Support, bear the weight of for a long time; maintain ... continuously." Sort of like a perpetual motion machine, which remains in the realm of the unattainable. Current  Archive     Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7