Free Republic

COLCHESTER, Vt. (AP) -- A bunch of kids in a minivan are solving twin challenges in northern Vermont: refugees struggling to find the food of their homelands and farmers looking to offload unwanted livestock. The half dozen kids - that is, baby goats - that arrived last week at Pine Island Farm were the latest additions to the Vermont Goat Collaborative, a project that brings together new Americans hungry for goat meat with dairy goat farmers who have no need for young male animals. Some dairy farmers who otherwise would discard bucklings at birth or spend valuable time finding homes...

The Bureau of Land Management, whose Director was Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) former senior adviser, has purged documents from its web site stating that the agency wants Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle off of the land his family has worked for over 140 years in order to make way for solar panel power stations. Corrupt Democratic Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) working with the Chinese gov’t to take land from hard-working Americans. Deleted from BLM.gov but reposted for posterity by the Free Republic, the BLM document entitled “Cattle Trespass Impacts” directly states that Bundy’s cattle “impacts” solar development, more specifically the construction of...

By SHIREE BUNDY COX: I have had people ask me to explain my dad’s stance on this BLM fight. Here it is in as simple of terms as I can explain it. There is so much to it, but here it is in a nut shell. My great grandpa bought the rights to the Bunkerville allotment back in 1887 around there. Then he sold them to my grandpa who then turned them over to my dad in 1972. These men bought and paid for their rights to the range and also built waters, fences and roads to assure the survival...

MILWAUKEE (AP) — A virus never before seen in the U.S. has killed millions of baby pigs in less than a year, and with little known about how it spreads or how to stop it, it's threatening pork production and pushing up prices by 10 percent or more.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Nearly a million jars of peanut butter were dumped at a New Mexico landfill this week to expedite the sale of a bankrupt peanut-processing plant that was at the heart of a 2012 salmonella outbreak and nationwide recall. Bankruptcy trustee Clarke Coll said he had no other choice after Costco Wholesale refused to take shipment of the Sunland Inc. product and declined requests to let it be donated to food banks or repackaged or sold to brokers who provide food to institutions like prisons. "We considered all options," Coll said. "They didn't agree." MelindaJoy Pattison, executive...

TAMPA, Fla. – Authorities say a Florida woman who was 9 months pregnant and her family became ill after eating meat tainted with LSD. Tampa police say doctors induced labor and the woman had a healthy baby boy. The entire family was eventually released from the hospital in good condition.

In 2008, California voters endorsed Proposition 2 which banned the confinement of animals. California egg producers had to ensure that chickens had enough room to move around which negated so-called “factory farming” and would end up raising the price of eggs by 20%.Obviously this was a problem for California agriculture which would have trouble competing on price with free agriculture. And there’s only so much of a market for fair-trade free-range organic chickens lovingly raised in a Quaker school by social justice experts on a strict diet of granola and NPR broadcasts.And so California’s reds decided to instead raise the...

Here Are The Countries That Spend The Most On Food Matthew BoeslerFeb. 24, 2014, 8:28 PM Renaissance Macro Research, Congressional Research Service This chart plots the share of household income in a given country spent on food against the level of household income in that country. Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro, warns that rising food prices may serve as an additional economic headwind to some of the emerging markets in the top-left region of the chart (India, China, Indonesia, and Nigeria, to name a few). "Food prices are climbing for a range of items including cattle,...

im Crawford was rushing to load crates of freshly picked organic tomatoes onto trucks heading for an urban farmers market when he noticed the federal agent. A tense conversation followed as the visitor to his farm — an inspector from the Food and Drug Administration — warned him that some organic-growing techniques he had honed over four decades could soon be outlawed. "This is my badge. These are the fines. This is what is hanging over your head, and we want you to know that," Crawford says the official told him. Crawford's popular farm may seem a curious place for...

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced Friday it will continue to monitor rain and snowfall, but at this point, there’s not enough water in the Central Valley Project to give water to farmers, the Associated Press reported. After receiving 20 percent of their normal allowance last year, Central Valley farmers will receive zero percent after Friday’s announcement... “I don’t think we’ve ever had a mandatory rationing of water throughout the entire state,” said Brown. “We’re just looking into the practicality and the legality of that.” The drought was also the focus of a weather science webcast Friday at the Aquarium...

Subway said today it is removing a chemical used in yoga mats and shoe soles from the bread of it its popular sandwiches after a food blogger got more than 50,000 signatures in a petition drive. "The complete conversion to have this product out of the bread will be done soon," Subway said in a statement. The company said the move had nothing to do with the protest and that it was "already in the process of removing azodicarbonamide as part of our bread improvement efforts." But Vani Hari, the activist blogger who takes credit for the removal of yellow...

Americans may recoil at the thought of eating horse meat, but other countries feel quite differently, as the sign above this butcher shop in Paris attests. Americans may recoil at the thought of eating horse meat, but other countries feel quite differently, as the sign above this butcher shop in Paris attests. When a federal ban on slaughtering horses to produce horse meat was lifted several years back, ranchers including Rick De Los Santos, a New Mexico rancher and owner of Valley Meat Co., stepped up to start operations with an aim to export the meat. But, as we've reported,...

Many consider sushi an art. But a new state law will soon require a glove between these artists and their creations. "The service is going to be slow because of the glove," said Gary Wong, a sushi chef. "When you're making sushi, you have to use the bare hand to feel the texture and the fish." Wong also worries that gloves could lead to fingers getting cut with a slip of the knife. And it's a worry shared across cuisines, like at Pican in downtown Oakland. "It's difficult because your hands sweat," said Sophina Uong, Pican's executive chef. "You're in...

Kraft announces that you may not double dip this year because Kraft has not been supplying enough Velveeta Cheese throughout all of the USA. There is ample supply in Chicago but on the Coasts there may be a run on it

At the end of 2013, China reported over 3 mln hectares of land too polluted to farm. About 3.33 million hectares (8 million acres) of China's farmland is too polluted to grow crops, a government official said on Monday, highlighting the risk facing agriculture after three decades of rapid industrial growth. China has been under pressure to improve its urban environment following a spate of pollution scares. But cleaning up rural regions could be an even bigger challenge as the government tries to reverse damage done by years of urban and industrial encroachment and ensure food supplies for a growing...

A report released Thursday indicates that just about all chicken sold in U.S. stores contains harmful bacteria, and nearly half are tainted with a so-called superbug that's resistant to antibiotics. The Consumer Reports study, its most comprehensive to date on poultry, tested raw chicken breasts purchased at retail outlets nationwide for six bacteria, then checked for antibiotic resistance. The results showed nearly half of the samples were contaminated with at least one bacterium resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics, what's known as a superbug. Slightly more than 10 percent were tainted with two superbugs. That finding is cause...

Momentum Machines robot enables a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices. It does everything employees can do except better: * it slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible. * their next revision will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem. * Also, our next revision will use gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in...

Since its publication in September 2012, a study that showed rats fed Monsanto’s glyphosate-resistant NK603 maize developed more tumors than controls has been roundly criticized for its poor experimental design and dubious statistical methods. Yesterday, the study was retracted. The retraction was initiated by the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology after the authors refused to withdraw it themselves.

The nation's largest producer of turkeys is warning of a shortage of birds, just in time for Thanksgiving. Butterball announced that it will be shipping out half as many large, fresh never-frozen turkeys to retailers this year. The company says many of its birds had trouble gaining weight during the production process. And though the cause of the problem remains a mystery, food distributors say their orders for turkeys 16 pounds and bigger have been slashed in half. Sixteen pounds is the national average for Thanksgiving holiday turkeys making this shortage a particularly concerning problem.

SPRINGFIELD - Butterball has just announced to officials at supermarkets around the country, including Big Y World Class Markets, that there is a national shortage of their large fresh (unfrozen) turkeys for this Thanksgiving. A mistake was made in the production of fresh Butterball brand turkeys this year and the company has cut every retailer's allotment by 50 percent, said Claire D'Amour-Daley, Big Y vice president of of corporate communications. The cut represents thousands of turkeys that would have been shipped to Big Y. The same goes for every other retailer, she said. Butterball's corporate offices did not return calls...