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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The US and Canada closed the deal on an updated NAFTA trade agreement last week. One of the key concessions by Canada is opening their dairy sector to more imports of U.S. milk and dairy products, including some from cows given the genetically-engineered hormone rBST. Canadian dairy farmers and some consumers are less than thrilled. […]
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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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Two mayors from Maine wrote a blog piece this week in The Hill as part of a nation-wide effort to block a proposed provision in the new Farm Bill. The House and Senate passed different versions of the bill, and members of both houses (and parties) are working together in a conference committee to develop a […]
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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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Does the excerpt below from the September 10th issue of Politico’s Morning Agriculture e-newsletter sound familiar? It echoes sentiments on Hygeia in an “Endnote” to our August 20, 2018 post on the Lee Johnson verdict and award, which states — Endnote: The first half of August 2018 will go down in the history of pesticide use and regulation […]
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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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Dicamba drift is in the news again, this time with a detailed story in Reuters about a strong, unusual statement by two large seed companies that urges the EPA to end post-emergent use of dicamba. Tom Polansek’s piece details the latest in damage estimates – over 1 million acres of soybeans alone have reportedly been injured by […]
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