Up it goes: food costs steadily on the rise
Kennebec Journal - 5/25/2009.By Mechele Cooper – Look at the register tape next time you walk out of a grocery store and you might notice that there has been a steady increase in the price for individual items. According to the Consumer Price Index, all food increased 5.5 percent in 2008, the highest annual increase since 1990, and is projected to increase 3 percent to 4 percent this year. |
|
Agency says climate change amplifying animal disease
Grist - 5/25/2009.PARIS, May 25, 2009 (AFP) - Climate change is widening viral disease among farm animals, expanding the spread of some microbes that are also a known risk to humans, the world’s top agency for animal health said on Monday. The World Animal Health Organization – known as OIE, an acronym of its name in French – said a survey of 126 of its member-states found 71 percent were “extremely concerned” about the expected impact of climate change on animal disease. |
|
Natural remedy’s advocate finding success
Kennebec Journal - 5/25/2009.By Keith Edwards – For 60 years, whenever Harold Brown found himself with poison ivy or other skin rash, he used the sweet fern his grandfather showed him to make the itching and rash go away. Last year, after years of giving it away, he decided to make a business out of sharing his cure, which he harvests wild and packages at his home just down the road from the Richmond dairy farm of his boyhood. |
|
Summer internships are going organic
Boston Globe - 5/24/2009. Erin Axelrod, who graduated from Barnard College last week with an urban studies degree, will not be fighting over the bathroom with her five roommates on the Upper West Side of Manhattan this summer. Instead she will be living in a tent, using an outdoor composting toilet, and harvesting vegetables on an organic farm near Petaluma, Calif. As the sole intern at a boutique dairy in upstate New York, Gina Runfola, an English and creative writing student, has traded poetry books for sheep. And Jamie Katz, an English major at Kenyon College in Ohio, is planting peach trees at Holly Tree Farm in Virginia. |
|