Grist | Topics | 160 Results

RESULTS		Results 51 – 75 of 160
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Headline	Author	Published	Section
Meat Wagon: Poultry-worker blues OSHA looks the other way while poultry giants abuse workers	Tom Philpott	11 Feb 2008	Gristmill
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. In an excellent muckraking report which underlines the importance of metropolitan newspapers, The Charlotte Observer has shined a bright light into one of the murkiest corners of our food system: poultry-packing factories. The report focuses on North Carolina-based House of Raeford, the nation's seventh-largest poultry packer. According to an industry trade journal, Raeford churns out 20 milli ...
Topics: agriculture, animal welfare, food, industrial ag (all these topics)

The Butz Stops Here A reflection on the lasting legacy of 1970s USDA Secretary Earl Butz	Tom Philpott	07 Feb 2008	Victual Reality
Industrial agriculture lost one of its greatest champions last week: Earl "Rusty" Butz, secretary of the USDA under Nixon. Blustering, boisterous, and often vulgar, Butz lorded over the U.S. farm scene at a key period. He plunged a pitchfork into New Deal agricultural policies that sought to protect farmers from the big agribusiness companies whose interests he openly ...
Topics: ag policy, agriculture, Department of Agriculture, industrial ag, Victual Reality (all these topics)

GMOs as environmental pollution Schmeiser to play David to Monsanto's Goliath again	Kurt Michael Friese	28 Jan 2008	Gristmill
Most of you will recall the high-profile battle fought by Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser when he was sued for growing their GM seed without tithing to the corporation for the privilege. Schmeiser insisted that Monsanto's patented DNA blew onto his land, but he lost an acrimonious fight in Canada's Supreme Court anyway. Now Percy's back for more. Schmeiser has filed suit against the agribusiness giant in his Bruno, Saskatchewan, small claims court ...
Topics: agriculture, business, food, GMOs, industrial ag, litigation (all these topics)

Eco-Farm: Seeds of ignorance Investigative journalist reveals serious safety concerns about GM food	Tom Philpott	25 Jan 2008	Gristmill
Note: For the next few days I'll be reporting from Eco-Farm, the annual conference held by the Ecological Farming Association of California. At Eco-Farm, some 1,400-1,500 organic farmers, Big Organic marketers, and sundry sustainable-ag enthusiasts pack into a rustic, beautiful seaside conference hall an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco to talk farming amid the dunes. I've been writing about genetically modified food since I first took up food-politics writing ...
Topics: agriculture, food, GMOs, health, industrial ag (all these topics)

Eco-Farm: Eric Schlosser on Florida pickers and fair wages Fast Food Nation author regales organic-farmer audience	Tom Philpott	25 Jan 2008	Gristmill
Note: For the next few days I'll be reporting from Eco-Farm, the annual conference held by the Ecological Farming Association of California. At Eco-Farm, some 1,400-1,500 organic farmers, Big Organic marketers, and sundry sustainable-ag enthusiasts pack into a rustic, beautiful seaside conference hall an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco to talk farming amid the dunes.The ever-excellent investigative writer Eric Schlosser kicked off Eco-Farm with a hard-hitting key ...
Topics: agriculture, food, industrial ag, organic food (all these topics)

Seeds of wisdom Seed-savers and greens unite to challenge Monsanto's latest cash cow	Tom Philpott	23 Jan 2008	Gristmill
For years, candy makers and other industrial food manufacturers refused to use genetically modified sugar, fearing a consumer backlash. Photo: iStockphoto As a result, Monsanto's Roundup Ready sugar beet -- designed to withstand heavy application of Roundup, Monsanto's herbicide -- has been dead in the water. (Sugar beets, grown in the Midwest and Northwest, account for half of U.S. sugar production; cane, grown mainly in Florida, provides the rest.) B ...
Topics: agriculture, business, food, GMOs, industrial ag (all these topics)

Send in the Clones Cloned meat and milk just as safe as conventional, says long-awaited FDA report		15 Jan 2008	News
Posted at 5:05 PM on 15 Jan 2008 In a nearly 1000-page report, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has concluded that food from cloned animals and their offspring "is as safe to eat as that from their more conventionally bred counterparts." The report effectively removes regulatory barriers to cloned food being offered to U.S. consumers, but practical barriers still remain, and it will ...
Topics: agriculture, food, industrial ag, news (all these topics)

Meat Wagon: Factory farms milk the government Conservation title schemes, youth flee CAFO country, and a side of E. coli beef	Tom Philpott	14 Jan 2008	Gristmill
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. In the business section of Sunday's New York Times, reporter Andrew Martin shined a bright light on a USDA program called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP. Funded through the conservation title of the farm bill, EQIP was originally intended to support farmers who wanted to improve the ecological performance of their farms -- say, by sharing the cost of building a fence to k ...
Topics: ag policy, agriculture, food, industrial ag, politics (all these topics)

Miracle grow Cargill's well-connected fertilizer unit wows Wall Street, dumps on Florida	Tom Philpott	11 Jan 2008	Gristmill
As I wrote last week, the real winners in the ethanol boom aren't corn growers or even ethanol makers (though the latter will do just fine). Rather, it's the companies that make the inputs needed for growing vast quantities of corn. Photo: iStockphoto Monsanto, the world's dominant producer of genetically modified seed traits as well as the No. 1 herbicide maker, demonstrated that principle with its quarterly profit report last week. It harvested quarterly ...
Topics: agriculture, business, economy, industrial ag, politics (all these topics)

Monsanto counts its cash Seed-and-chemical giant sees its profit triple	Tom Philpott	04 Jan 2008	Gristmill
In a gold rush, the firms that supply the gold diggers with tools -- not the gold diggers themselves -- make the highest and steadiest profits. That's a platitude, but it's also usually true. And it's now playing out in the boom in corn-based ethanol. Don't waste much time envying corn farmers. Sure, they've seen the price of their product double over the past year and a half or so. But they've also seen their costs inch up. Fertilizer, land rents (much of the farml ...
Topics: agriculture, biofuels, business, energy, ethanol, food, industrial ag (all these topics)

Meat Wagon: Get it while it's hot Avoid burgers in Texas, Hillary gets charred for CAFO ties, and more	Tom Philpott	31 Dec 2007	Gristmill
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. In a proper finale to an E. coli-tainted 2007, the USDA has issued a public-heath alert regarding 14,800 pounds of stolen hamburger meat down in Texas. Get this: the hot meat is 'thought to be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.' By my calculations, there is enough of the tainted stuff floating around Texas to produce no fewer than 74,000 quarter pounders. Texas Grist readers, don't say you we ...
Topics: agriculture, food, health, Hillary Clinton, industrial ag, Iowa, politics, Texas (all these topics)

Flying By Nitrogen Ammonium drifts into national parks		28 Dec 2007	News
Posted at 4:24 PM on 28 Dec 2007 You may not be able to smell cow poop in Yellowstone, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain National Parks, but the air there has become increasingly contaminated with nitrogen compound ammonium, says a recent report from the National Park Service. Possibly originating in concentrated animal feeding operations, ammonium in the three parks -- as well as six other parks in Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota, and Utah -- was m ...
Topics: agriculture, air pollution, industrial ag, National Park Service, national parks, news (all these topics)

Feedlot meat production: nothing if not profitable Tyson Foods chief nets $10 million -- oops, no, $24 million	Tom Philpott	27 Dec 2007	Gristmill
Update [2007-12-28 10:14:4 by Tom Philpott]:According to AP, Tyson CEO Richard Bond made total compensation of $24 million in 2007, not $9.88 million, as reported by Bloomberg. Here's how industrial meat production works: you stuff animals into pens, feed them genetically modified, nutritionally suspect corn and soy (along with growth hormones), and force them to wallow in their own waste while keeping them alive with regular lashings of antibiotics.Then you haul the ...
Topics: agriculture, Big Ag, business, food, industrial ag (all these topics)

European biodiesel: riding on empty? Unlike the U.S., European governments are cutting back on agrofuel goodies	Tom Philpott	27 Dec 2007	Gristmill
European biodiesel makers have entered a rough patch. The price for their main feedstock, rapeseed, has risen more than 50 percent since the beginning of the year. But the price of the final product, biodiesel, has plunged, because producers are churning out far more biodiesel than the market can absorb.Similar conditions hold sway among U.S. ethanol makers: heightened corn prices combined with an ethanol glut. But U.S. producers are celebrating while their European cou ...
Topics: ag subsidies, agriculture, biofuels, energy, European Union, industrial ag (all these topics)

Swine, feedlots, and flu No holiday cheer from the meat industry	Tom Philpott	26 Dec 2007	Gristmill
This isn't what you want to hear about in the wake of the holiday feast, but here goes. From a meat-industry trade journal:A new strain of swine influenza -- H2N3, which belongs to the group of H2 influenza viruses that last infected humans during the 1957 pandemic, has been identified by researchers. However, this new strain has a molecular twist: It is composed of avian and swine influenza genes.Yikes: Bird and pig flus, combined into one that can infect humans. As th ...
Topics: agriculture, Big Ag, health, industrial ag, news (all these topics)

Franken-broccoli? The GM seed giants lumber into the veggie patch	Tom Philpott	19 Dec 2007	Gristmill
In 2005, Monsanto bought Seminis, the world's largest vegetable-seed company. At the time, Monsanto -- which enjoys a dominant position in the global market for GM soy, corn, and cotton traits -- claimed it had no imminent plans to subject veggies to genetic modification. Now I learn from the excellent new blog SeedStory, by Matthew Dillon of the Organic Seed Alliance, that Monsanto is working on RoundUp Ready lettuce. And the few other transnational giants that domi ...
Topics: food, agriculture, business, industrial ag, GMOs (all these topics)

Pollan connects the dots Why bees and pigs are not machines	Maywa Montenegro	17 Dec 2007	Gristmill
In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan writes, "Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we're growing food today." Can you guess what they are? Answer here.
Topics: industrial ag, agriculture, food, health, wildlife (all these topics)

Senate farm bill post-mortem The Sustainable Ag Coalition delivers its assessment	Tom Philpott	17 Dec 2007	Gristmill
Ferd Hoefner of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has been involved in farm bills since the mid-1970s, working behind the scenes to try to snatch farm legislation from the paws of agribusiness. So when he delivers his assessment on how things went, he does so from the perspective of long memory. His insights are particularly important now, as sustainable-ag and food-justice advocates figure out what's in the Senate version that's worth fighting for. And there ...
Topics: industrial ag, sustainable ag, agriculture, legislation, ag policy, politics (all these topics)

Two takes on the farm bill My opinion, and an industrial soybean farmer's	Tom Philpott	16 Dec 2007	Gristmill
Speaking of the farm bill -- and who isn't -- y'all should check out an interview I recently did with something called the Lambert Report. Check out the big ol' Monsanto ad in the upper right corner. And look what they juxtaposed my answers with: those of a dude who used to be president of the American Soybean Association.
Topics: politics, legislation, agriculture, industrial ag (all these topics)

Hillary Clinton frets publicly about CAFOs What must the 'Rural Americans for Hillary' think of this?	Tom Philpott	14 Dec 2007	Gristmill
Days after naming a high-profile champion of factory-style animal farms as co-chair of "Rural Americans for Hillary," Hillary Clinton backtracked a little yesterday. She expressed wan and tepid concern about the environmental and social effects of concentrated-animal feedlot operations (CAFOs). She told the Des Moines Register she would support "local control" over how CAFOs are regulated -- meaning that states and counties would be able to instit ...
Topics: industrial ag, agriculture, politics, elections, presidential race 08, Hillary Clinton, Iowa (all these topics)

Meat Wagon: A roundup of outrages from the meat industry Cruelty to hogs, and wretched meatpacking conditions	Tom Philpott	13 Dec 2007	Gristmill
As the Senate debates the farm bill, which contains an entire title that would limit the power of the industrial-meat giants, you might think the industry would be on its best behavior, trying to act mellow while its lobbyists sort things out on the Hill. And yet the industry is currently churning out outrages as if they were sausage: hence 'Meat wagon,' a new regular feature. Here we go: The animal-rights group PETA has gotten hold of a video showing system ...
Topics: animal welfare, industrial ag, agriculture, food (all these topics)

On corn, meat, and the myth of Big Farma Why we shouldn't target farmers for our farm bill frustrations	Guest author	13 Dec 2007	Gristmill
We're very pleased to run this guest essay by Elanor Starmer, an independent activist scholar who lives in California. Elanor recently published an important paper (PDF) on the livestock industry with Tim Wise of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. As the farm bill lurches to its conclusion amid shrill rhetoric about the 'farm bloc,' Elanor redirects our attention to the real beneficiaries of both federal farm policy and conventional at ...
Topics: ag policy, agriculture, food, industrial ag, legislation, politics (all these topics)

Hillary and Big Meat HRC taps a CAFO champion as co-chair of Rural Americans for Hillary	Tom Philpott	11 Dec 2007	Gristmill
"A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolifigacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise ...
Topics: agriculture, elections, food, Hillary Clinton, industrial ag, politics, presidential race 08 (all these topics)

Bitter fruit How corporate control of produce markets squeezes workers, farmers, and consumers	Tom Philpott	29 Nov 2007	Gristmill
As most Grist readers know by now, a few giant corporations essentially control the meat industry -- they lock up the bulk of the profits and impose harsh terms on farmers, workers, livestock, and the environment. The meat they produce evidently damages those who eat it as well. Things aren't much different in the fresh fruit and vegetable world. In Florida, the ever-excellent Eric Schlosser shows in a New York Times op-ed piece, the migrant farmwor ...
Topics: agriculture, business, food, industrial ag (all these topics)

A Kernel of Wisdom Europe may ban two types of genetically modified corn		26 Nov 2007	News
Posted at 9:58 AM on 26 Nov 2007 Europe may end up sans two types of genetically modified corn, as E.U. environment officials have proposed a ban on the seeds. Officials say the GM corn, made by powerful biotech companies DuPont Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences, and Syngenta, could harm wildlife and disrupt food chains. E.U. Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said the genetically modified corn could have "unexpected ecos ...
Topics: agriculture, European Union, GMOs, industrial ag, news (all these topics)

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Stories About: industrial ag