Much will be said about the EPA’s October 31, 2018 decision to extend for two more years the conditional registration of the three dicamba-based herbicides registered for post-emergence, “over the top” (OTT) applications on soybeans and cotton. The basics of the EPA’s decision are simple and not entirely meaningless in terms of reducing the extent […]
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Note to Readers: Steve Smith, Chairman and founder of the Save Our Crops Coalition and R+D Director of Red Gold (a major midwest tomato processor), has been actively engaged in the evolution and approval of dicamba-resistant crops. He has raised concern — and more recently alarm — over the damage done to non-target crops, trees, […]
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There is a new epidemiology paper in JAMA Internal Medicine by a team of French government scientists that reports a 25% decrease in overall cancer risk from relatively high levels of organic food consumption, compared to little or no consumption, among a large cohort (just under 69,000 individuals, with 1,340 incident cancer cases four years post study […]
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While the Farm Bill update hasn’t made it through Congress yet, it’s passage is an eventual certainty, if perhaps broken up into pieces. In an opinion piece in The Hill, economic policy Research Fellow Michael Farren with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University proposes a different and radical option – a full repeal of […]
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By: Rachel Benbrook and Dr. Charles Benbrook Are bees finally going to catch a break? Amidst lots of bad news about the decline of managed honeybees and other wild pollinators, the Seattle Times reports this week on an innovative new approach to boost pollinator health. It involves some out-of-the-box science from Paul Stamets, a mycologist from […]
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Steve Smith is the Director of Agriculture for Red Gold, which processes 80% of the tomato crop in the Midwest, and Chairman of the Save Our Crops Coalition. He recently traveled from Indiana to Washington D.C. for a September 28, 2018 meeting with senior EPA officials. The topic — the EPA’s pending decision on whether, and […]
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First, the back story. Over the years, the USDA has almost always sided with pesticide manufacturers and farmers, in opposition to EPA efforts to curtail or end the use of high-risk pesticides. The arguments advanced by the USDA are always basically the same: There are no viable alternatives to this pesticide. Consumers will face food […]
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The following “Open Letter” has been sent to the CEO of Cibus, a company doing cutting-edge R+D using CRISPR and other gene-editing and gene-silencing technologies (referred to as CRISPR et al. in the letter below). The letter responds to a recent Scientific American Network blog by the CEO of Cibus, Dr. Peter Beetham. His hope, and Cibus’s mission, […]
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Answer — What to do about dicamba? Larry Steckel is a widely respected extension weed scientist who has worked for 30+ years for the University of Tennessee. He welcomed and enjoyed the wondrous years, 1996 through about 2004, when one or two applications of Roundup worked flawlessly on almost all corn, soybean, and cotton farms. […]
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By now most everyone who reads the paper or watches the news has heard about Lee Johnson’s trial in San Francisco. The Benicia School District groundskeeper was awarded $289 million by the jury. The twelve members of the jury voted Lee Johnson’s way on each of 17 questions submitted to it by the Judge Suzanne […]
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