Free Republic

A vote at the European Commission on Monday means a continent-wide ban on pesticides linked to bee deaths could be in place later this year. Neonicotinoid chemicals in sprays are believed to harm bees, whose numbers have been falling across Europe. The European Commission says they should be restricted to crops not attractive to bees and other pollinators, but many farmers and crop experts have argued that there is insufficient data. The Commission will impose a two-year restriction on neonicotinoids after 15 countries voted in favour of a ban on Monday - not enough to form a qualified majority, but...

Today the new print quarterly Modern Farmer published a lengthy piece on the crop of marijuana farmers’ markets popping up in states where marijuana is legal for medical or recreational purposes. Penned by your humble editor, the feature focuses on the Organicann Harvest Market in Sonoma County – an elite member of the new crop of legal marijuana markets that are similar to the trendy, open-air vegetable markets of our time. “Still federally illegal, of course, such markets are legal under California state law, provided vendors and customers join a collective with a valid doctor’s recommendation for pot and a...

First came the fire, then the blast. Assuming the EMS reports are correct, a terror attack on U.S. soil is responsible for only the second-largest mass-casualty event this week. Dwell on that. Unbelievable: West EMS Director Dr. George Smith says as many as 60 or 70 people died and hundreds were injured Wednesday night in a fertilizer plant explosion in West. A rescuer earlier said he knew of five deaths. Meanwhile, emergency crews were pulling back late Wednesday night because of concerns about the possibility of a second explosion… The fire started in an anhydrous ammonia tank and spread to...

Under criticism for handing over personal data on farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, the Environmental Protection Agency defended its actions as “cost-effective under current budget constraints.” “Normally, we’d harry these despoilers of the environment ourselves,” said Bob Perciasepe, Acting EPA Administrator. “But with the budget being hemmed in by the sequester we have to seek other ways of achieving our objectives. We saw arming these environmental groups with potentially useful information as a way of multiplying or leveraging our forces. We thought we’d get more bang for the buck, so to speak.” if you missed any of this week's...

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman seems to have a “thing” about biotechnology — the same sort of thing that Creationists have about Darwinism. Relentlessly negative and increasingly bizarre, he rationalizes his prejudices with misrepresentations and complete falsehoods. Although the statement has become something of a cliché, it is nevertheless true that Bittman is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts. His latest screed, “Why Do GMO’s Need Protection” (April 2), contains one factual error after another: – Bittman refers to Section 735, a provision in the Farm Bill passed by Congress and signed into...

IN 1999, as a writer for The American Prospect, I went into a slaughterhouse undercover, with the help of some rebellious employees. The floor was slick with the residue of blood and suet, and the air smelled like iron. A part of my brain spent the whole time trying to remember which of Dante’s circles this scene most resembled. Today, under legislation being pushed by business interests, that bit of journalistic adventure could earn me a criminal conviction and land me on a registry of “animal and ecological terrorists.” So-called ag-gag laws, proposed or enacted in about a dozen states,...

When the Obama EPA is not spying on cattle and pork ranches with drones, they’re illegally releasing information on livestock producers to far left extremist groups. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Producers are furious after the Obama Environmental Protection Agency illegally gave information on livestock farmers to extremist animal rights groups. Farm Futures reported: NCBA and the National Pork Producers Council are both furious with EPA for handing extremist groups illegally gathered data on farmers who operate confined animal feeding operations. NCBA said early this week it was notified by the EPA that the agency had...

German scientists are seriously developing a laser based system of weed control in order to be more "environmentally friendly" than using chemical poisons. What could go wrong ? Laser armed Robots and drones for farming and weed control and they will have artificial intelligence algorithms and high resolution cameras for recognizing plants. They would have the goal of having this on a large scale for better "organic farming". The laser system is currently being tested in a greenhouse. Drones or small robotic planes would fly over the fields. These could also fight weeds near protected waters, where herbicides are not...

ObamaCare’s benevolent promise to help control and curtail healthcare-related costs is already going magnificently bust; why not just extend the consequences of heightened compliance costs and pricey taxes to an entirely other but equally indispensable economic sector while they’re at it, right? As the Federal Drug Administration so munificently explains, part of ObamaCare’s overall purpose is to help provide Americans with all of the tools they need to lead healthier lives (with a universal healthcare system that requires society to absorb the costs of individuals’ daily health-related decisions, what choice do they have but to butt into those decisions?) —...

SOUTH BAY, Fla. -- From a distance it looks as if tornadoes are churning in the fields. But as you get closer, you see that the dark plumes are clouds of black smoke. And if your smell is keen enough, you realize it's sugar cane that's burning. Trucks hauling trailers full of cane stalks crowd the northbound lanes of Route 27 for a stretch just south of Lake Okeechobee. In the southbound lanes the trailers are empty. They're running between the cane fields that dominate this northernmost part of the Everglades and the Okeelanta sugar mill, owned by the Fanjul...

What is the trigger for a revolution? Sometimes it a brutal act of repression. Sometimes it a lost war, or a natural catastrophe, that exposes the failings of a regime. But more often than not, it is soaring food prices. The easiest prediction to make for 2013 is that everything we eat will once again rise sharply in price. So where will the revolutions start this year? Keep an eye on Algeria and Greece — and if you want to feel very nervous, Russia and China. And if you are smart, keep your money out of those countries as well....

We've all heard the story of the "40 acres and a mule" promise to former slaves. It's a staple of black history lessons, and it's the name of Spike Lee's film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government's massive confiscation of private property -- some 400,000 acres -- formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves....

VICKSBURG, Miss. (AP) — About 80 employees at Anderson-Tully Company's sawmill operation at the Port of Vicksburg will be laid off by Jan. 4. The company tells the Vicksburg Post (http://bit.ly/TMsjgp ) that the move has been in the works for two months because of a depressed housing market. Company president Richard Wilkerson says a second shift is being dropped...

SEATTLE – In two weeks, adults in this state will no longer be arrested or incarcerated for something that nearly 30 million Americans did last year. For the first time since prohibition began 75 years ago, recreational marijuana use will be legal; the misery-inducing crusade to lock up thousands of ordinary people has at last been seen, by a majority of voters in this state and in Colorado, for what it is: a monumental failure. That is, unless the Obama administration steps in with an injunction, as it has threatened to in the past, against common sense. For what stands...

USAgNet - Smithfield Packing Company Inc., a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, plans to begin its planned closure of a Portsmouth, Va. hot dog and lunch meat production facility. MeatPoultry reports that the firm announced the closure this past November. Layoffs are expected to begin at the Portsmouth plant in January, and the facility will be closed by the end of March 2013. The company says its first round of layoffs will impact about 120 workers. Another 400 employees will be affected by the plant closure....

Living in a big city, as I do, it isn’t hard for me to spend a lot on dinner. One big meal, and you can find yourself over $200 poorer, just for two people. Of course, it isn’t hard for me to spend very little on dinner either. I got fried pork chops and pork fried rice sent to me from the local Chinese takeout last night, and the whole meal cost me something like nine dollars. What is hard to get is a meal for $50 or so, and that seemingly innocuous fact speaks to an insidious trend not...

The much demonized kulaks (a/k/a the top 5%, 2%, 0r 1% depending upon the speech) were the first to rise up against Obama. Now the kulaks have been joined by the common peasantry, via NPR: As Mitt Romney and President Obama get ready for their second debate, a new bipartisan survey shows a surge for Romney in a key voter group following their first debate Oct. 3. The random cellphone and land line poll of 600 likely rural voters in nine battleground states Oct. 9-11 has Romney at 59 percent among the survey’s respondents. Obama’s support is now down to...

"Gilbert plans to use her title as Miss Greater Springfield 2013 to promote a platform of educating women with disordered eating habits. According to Gilbert, nearly 75 percent of young women have a negative perception of food, a trend she hopes to change."

Modern wheat is a "perfect, chronic poison," according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who has published a book all about the world's most popular grain. Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn't the wheat your grandma had: "It's an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the '60s and '70s," he said on "CBS This Morning." "This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there's a new protein in this thing called gliadin. It's not gluten. I'm not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. I'm talking about everybody else...

UN Food Aid Delivered to US Schools (Associated Posers) – Savannah, Georgia – The shocking images broadcast around the world of hungry children being fed a bare subsistence diet is mobilizing the world to render aid. United Nations food trucks have begun arriving to avert an international disaster. Donor countries include China, which has furnished 500 tons of rice aboard a vessel en route to San Diego. Supplemental food aid from Canada, including wheat, are being flown in. A line of UN-marked planes line the tarmac of Savannah-Hilton Head International Airport. “Shockingly some of these schools cannot serve more than...

The Shnott family says they would have lost everything had the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission not ruled their way. The FERC has ruled that Idaho power providers must buy wind power even when demand for power is low. This could raise the price of electricity for customers, but it can save the family wind farms like the one belonging to the Shnott family. “This ruling was a God-send. It means we won't have to sell the farm at a major loss. It means the children can go to school knowing its not the last time they can see their friends.”...

(Associated Posers) - Chick-fil-A came to terms with Chicago aldermen and has come away making changes to it's founders stand for traditional marriage. The College Park, Georgia-based company says that it will no longer bar gay chickens from being used to make it's chicken sandwiches. "All of our tests have determined that gay chickens taste just like chicken" the company said in a press release cheered by homosexual activist groups. "Therefore there is no longer a policy against the use of gay chickens for our delicious meals". A month ago supporters of the chicken chain clogged roads to break sales...

As part of her anti-obesity Let's Move campaign, First Lady Michelle Obama is now presenting a brief online course: “Supermarket Shopping 101.” The course, which now appears on the letsmove.gov website, provides novice shoppers with tips such as “steer clear of the cookie, snack and soda aisle.” “Supermarket Shopping 101: Read This Before You Hit the Grocery Store,” written by Lisa Cericola, was first published among the materials the first lady presented online last week when she was a "guest editor" at iVillage.com. Now, it has been republished on the Let’s Move blog. As CNSNews.com previously reported, iVillage.com, which featured...

Winter is coming.... The time will come when winter will ask you what you were doing all summer. - Henry Clay I love the story of the Little Red Hen. It is an amazing metaphor for what we truly should be looking for in our current society. It is what, "We The People" are missing on the most basic level. If you don't remember the story, here is a quick recap for you; Come on over to "The Event" to read more; http://www.preparespokane.blogspot.com/2012/08/winter-is-coming.html

The U.S. Government is suing New Mexico for perceived damages in a groundwater case, and the prize is control of the state's water. In May 2011 we learned that the EPA was beginning to change the way America's waters are controlled, and that control was to be extended to your ponds and puddles. Happening now in New Mexico: The lawyers told the committee [New Mexico Legislature Water and Natural Resources] the U.S. government is apparently trying to take over legal management of the state's water supply. The federal government has asserted claims for damages to groundwater in a natural resource...

Yesterday, Senate Democrats dropped President Obama’s proposal to raise the death tax in favor of their own. Their plan included stripping all death tax provisions out of S. 3412. By purposefully dropping the death tax provision, at the end of the year the tax is set to revert to pre-2001 tax cut levels, a rate that is higher than the President’s initial proposal. With her AYE vote on S. 3412, Senator McCaskill voted to subject Missouri small businesses, farms, and ranches to millions of dollars in additional taxes on earned assets. In 2006, McCaskill said that she supported “extending the...

Three men pled guilty to human trafficking after the "government" brought charges. Five others were involved and charged - all executives at Los Angeles' Global Horizons. The Feds touted this case as the biggest human trafficking case in this Nation's history and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed their charges saying it was the largest human trafficking case in agriculture to date." The government has spent millions in tax payer monies to prosecute a case in which all of the complainants are in the U.S. legally. Flash forward from 2010 when this case began, and the DOJ now says...

You basterds!

Check this video out - The timeline of the oil spill and what BO did throughout to fix it. It was put together very well. This should be running now!

1. Put this in your "God is really, really smart. Humans? Not so much." file. Within just the last few years, farmers all over the U.S. have noticed a strange and completely heretofore unseen incidence of SULFUR deficiency in crops. Odd. Why would sulfur deficiency issues suddenly appear where they had never been seen before? It turns out that the sulfur in the diesel burned by the tractors would aerosolize in the exhaust, and then precipitate and FERTILIZE the ground at planting and harvest as the tractor effectively covered the entire field. When the tyrannical government removed pretty much all...

To the disappointment of those who wanted to see reform and fiscal responsibility prevail, Debbie Stabenow’s (D-Mich.) farm bill passed in the Senate on Thursday with a vote of 64-35. The proposed bill fails to reform certain programs like sugar, makes other wasteful programs like dairy even worse, and creates a whole new entitlement program for farmers, while spending 60 percent more than the last farm bill and only cutting a paltry $23 billion from the deficit over the next ten years. This farm bill will leave a wide path of destruction behind it: consumer prices will increase, costly entitlement...

Rio de Janeiro—The People’s Summit for Social and Environmental Justice at the Rio +20 Earth Summit sprawls through the beautiful Flamengo Park that curves along the lovely beach at Guanabara Bay. Giant tents in the park house five chief plenary discussions and scores of smaller tents shelter a wide variety of earnest discussions about the perfidy of corporations in this age of late capitalism. As it happens, I just caught the tail-end of a speech at the Energy Plenary by an American black woman who urged the audience to fight for “economic, social, gender, and erotic justice.” Evidently fearing that...

Xi'an Up Close 《西安零�离》, an investigative journalism programme which airs on Xi'an TV, has become a national laughing stock after airing a report on June 17 on a "mystery mushroom" which was discovered by villagers in a rural part of the city. Residents of the Liucunbu village on the outskirts of the capital of the Shaanxi province say they came across a strange fungi-like object as they hit bedrock while drilling a new well. The perplexed villagers decided to call up their local TV station for help, which sent intrepid reporter Ye Yunfeng to their sleepy little hamlet to get...

A Spotted Owl may do what Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Johnny Ringo, the Clanton gang, the Gunfight at the OK Corral and two major fires couldn’t do: destroy Tombstone, known throughout the century as “The town too tough to die!” According to several CNN reports, Tombstone may soon run out of water because of a broken 26-mile water pipeline, which runs through a National Forest....

Winding down his media blitz from the Food Stamp Challenge, Mario Batali appeared on last night’s The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell to defend his decision to feed his family of four on a food stamp budget, which is to say: $31 dollars per person per week, which breaks down to $1.48 per meal. His biggest lesson? “Shopping at more than one store was the key to understanding it,” Batali said to his disciple O’Donnell, live from the kitchen of Babbo (which I am surprised can handle a live media feed, unless there’s also a secret green screen room at...

This week, the House will vote to slash Agriculture spending by $33.7 billion. This presents a huge opportunity to reform agriculture in a free-market direction, yet it’s an opportunity being squandered by Congress. For one thing, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, is pushing a Farm Bill that reportedly contains only $24.7 billion in spending cuts. Yet not all farm programs are treated equal and some don’t even rely on direct payments to farmers at all. The most market distorting programs rely on a convoluted system of supply management and price control programs, where government buys...

MERCED, Calif.—Dollar General Inc., whose discount stores have stolen bargain-seeking shoppers from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., is trying to grab a share of the grocery business. The idea behind entering the notoriously low margin business? That stocking fresh food and more refrigerated products in midsize stores will drive shoppers to visit more frequently—and increase how much they spend on standard dollar-store fare, from corn chips to children's clothing. So far, Dollar General Market stores aren't nearly as profitable as the company's traditional dollar stores, which now number 10,000, though the company says the profit gap is narrowing. Competition is heating up...

Although negotiations over a package of tax increases and a proposed casino collapsed Monday night, the Maryland General Assembly passed a lot of bills this session — 791, to be exact. Of those, 96 percent were passed in the last week, including hundreds in the hours and minutes before midnight on Monday. Here are some highlights from the 90-day session’s last day: STORMWATER FEE The Senate spent much of the session’s waning hours fiercely debating a stormwater fee bill that was on few people’s radar earlier in the session. The bill requires localities to fund projects to reduce polluted runoff...

An incredible editorial in the Modesto Bee makes me believe that some in the mainstream media actually do get it, and in more ways than one. The Bee believes that a lawsuit filed against the California Milk Advisory Board and the California Department of Agriculture by the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is indeed “silly” and “misdirected.” I couldn’t agree more.

From the earliest days of the Wild West, water rights have always been a bone of contention and, no doubt, the cause of more than one gunfight. It’s still an issue to this day. But instead of being a dispute between farmer and rancher or cattleman and sheepherder, it’s now a battle between people and fish. Two years ago, the Delta smelt, a tiny, minnow-like fish, caused a brouhaha. In an effort to save this fish (which has no commercial value whatsoever), water supplies to California’s Central Valley were severely limited. As a direct result, this fertile agricultural center was...

Coming soon to CSPAN and OWN, a brand new reality show that brings you the gritty underside of life in the elementary school cafeteria! Janet Napolitano HHS and Michelle Obama team up to crack down and crack heads when it comes to unhealthy snack foods.

Madison, WI — The International Dairy-Deli-Bakery Association™ (IDDBA) has announced the speaker lineup for Dairy-Deli-Bake 2012. The event will be held June 10-12 in New Orleans, LA at the New Orleans Morial Convention Center. This year’s speakers include: Sarah Palin, Paula Deen, Terry Bradshaw, John Pinette, Jeremy Gutsche, Adrian Slywotzky, Jim Carroll, Jane Buckingham, Harold Lloyd, Steve Beekhuizen, Jack Li, and Carol Christison. The Heart of a Rogue Trailblazer In 2006, Sarah Palin became the youngest person and the first female to be elected as governor of Alaska. A short two years later, she was tapped to be the vice-presidential...

Consumer rights' advocates filed a lawsuit against McDonald's fast food chain in Russia. The lawsuit was filed at Moscow's Tverskoy Court. The plaintiffs intend to oblige the company to indicate the complete list of ingredients on packaging, rather than the content of protein, fat and carbohydrates. Representatives of the Consumer Rights Protection Society claim that concealing the content of products the company violates the status of the retail outlet of finished products, not to mention the fact that it misleads consumers. According to experts, the range of milkshakes, which the chain sells, can not be referred to as "milk" under...

President Obama, I oppose your appointment of Michael Taylor, a former VP and Lobbyist for Monsanto, the widely criticized Genetically Modified (GM) food multinational, as Senior Advisor to the Commissioner at the FDA. Taylor is the same person who was Food Safety Czar at the FDA when Genetically Modified Organisms were allowed into the US food supply without undergoing a single test to determine their safety or risks. This is a travesty. Taylor was in charge of policy for Monsanto's now-discredited GM Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) which is directly linked to cancer and opposed by many medical and hospital organizations.

The chart above displays annual refined sugar prices (cents per pound) using data from the USDA (Tables 2 and 5) between 1982 and 2011 for: a) the U.S. wholesale refined sugar price at Midwest markets, and b) the world refined sugar price. Due to import quota restrictions that strictly limit the amount of imported sugar coming into the U.S. at the world price, the domestic producers are protected from more efficient foreign sugar growers who can produce cane sugar in Central America, Africa and the Caribbean at half the cost of beet sugar in Minnesota and Michigan. Of course,...

Well, here’s the totalitarian state, right before my eyes! Today in the mail came a largish envelop for me from The “National Agricultural Statistics Service”, postage and fees paid by USDA Permit No. G-38. A prominant blocked off area on the envelop front stated in large bold letters, “YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW.” Also on the envelop and several places inside I find Obama-style logos for the USDA, and one with “AGRICULTURE COUNTS” around the outside, and at the base of the rolling landscape “NASS,” which stands for National Agricultural Statistics Service. That’s right: now we have a National...

[ed note: Found! In a dumpster behind Hamburg Inn, the first draft of University of Iowa professor Stephen G. Bloom's anthropology dissertation for Atlantic magazine explaining the bizarre cultural mores of the primative Aborigines who pay his salary.] IOWA CITY -- On January 3, Iowans will trudge through snow, sleet, sludge, mud, ice, corn, beans, pig feces, flaming lakes of ethanol, gale-force blizzards -- whatever it takes -- to join their neighbors that evening in 1,784 living rooms, barns, community halls, recreation barns, silos, wigwams, and public-school Corn God sacrifice altars in a kind of Norman Rockwell-meets-HR Geiger old timey...

..........."Romney and Santorum (like Gingrich and Obama) both go 4-for-4 on the ethanol lobby's scorecard. Paul goes 2-for-4 because he would cut oil subsidies and allow 15-percent ethanol blends to be sold, but opposes the mandate and other subsidies. Rick Perry went 0-for-4."

A graphic interpretation of recent changes to the US dietary guidelines shows that the average American adheres to the national food guide MyPlate just seven days out of the year. Using its National Eating Trends statistics, which have been tracking the eating and drinking habits of US consumers for 30 years, market research company the NPD Group found that only two percent of Americans’ diets -- equal to about seven days a year -- come close to the US Department of Agriculture’s new dietary guidelines launched this summer....

It has been a bit since I have written a blog, mainly because I only write them when I moved by the heart to do so. I have also been staying off twitter out of disgust for watching so called conservatives judge not by past deeds but only by words that a candidate is spinning today-sorry I donÂ’t tolerate fools easily. Sorry, I am more into judging by actions, the character of a man does not change they just learn to hide it better (& no that was not a veiled swipe at Newtie & Mittens it was a...