Free Republic

Millions of people are in for a shock at the end of the week when their food stamp benefits will be cut across the board. There is little chance that Congress will act to avert what hunger activists call the “food stamp cliff” — a cut to benefits that will affect some 47 million beneficiaries, including children and the elderly. The cut takes effect on Nov. 1, and will bring an end to a funding increase that Democrats wrapped into President Obama’s 2009 stimulus law. For a family of four, the cut will be $36 per month, or about 20...

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced that four Chinese poultry processors have permission to begin shipping meat to the U.S. The nightmare for U.S. consumers? The Chinese-processed chicken will be labeled as ‘made in America!’ Even though the Chinese poultry processors are only allowed to ship cooked meat from U.S.-raised chickens, many in the United States are alarmed that our leaders would allow such a deal to go down in the first place. After all, China is notorious for its food safety problems. Concerns among the public are warranted when you consider that the CDC estimates 325,000 Americans...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) extolled a local elementary school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. for making its students try broccoli gratin, Tuscan kale, and beet hummus, as an example of the department’s efforts to fight obesity. Clinton Elementary School held a “taste test” to preview food that will soon appear on the lunch menu, and was highlighted by USDA for its healthy eating efforts. The Poughkeepsie City school district received a $100,000 grant from the USDA for its “farm to school project,” which it is using to add items such as “butternut squash puree” to school menus. The funding was...

There is currently a letter floating around the internet from United States Department of Agriculture addressed to all (SNAP) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program state agency directors. The letter states in pretty plain terms the USDA is directing States to hold or delay transmission of State Electronic benefit transfer (EBT) until further notice.

A sign advertising low-interest housing loans at the Crescent Shores Subdivision in Lincoln, Delaware. The government shut-down has halted the processing of these loans, which are aimed at low- and moderate-income buyers. The week-old federal government shutdown is a disaster on many levels. For rural America, one major impact is in the area of housing. For the near future, low- and moderate-income homebuyers who have applied for mortgages guaranteed or made directly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Housing Service are out of luck. So are very low-income homeowners seeking repair grants or loans.

"......Feeding South Florida is just one of 202 food banks in the country hit hard by the Washington, D.C., stalemate. With 47 employees, it’s the largest of nine in Florida, responsible for 30 percent of statewide distribution. The agency distributes 35 million pounds of food a year from its 70,000-square-foot warehouse, everything from bananas and pears, to turkeys and hams, to soups and nuts, even baby formula. The USDA funding accounts for more than one-third of Feeding South Florida’s supply chain. On Thursday, its six open loading bays were filled with volunteers heaving food into U-Hauls and other trucks. The...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has turned off its entire website in response to the government shutdown, leaving farmers, reporters and others with no way to access any of the agency’s information online. A visit to usda.gov sends readers to a “funding lapse” page that reads, “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available. After funding has been restored, please allow some time for this website to become available again.” USDA’s total website shutdown goes far beyond the response of other federal agencies, and seems to be part of an effort to make people feel...

The Agriculture Department says 524 schools—out of about 100,000—have dropped out of the federally subsidized national school lunch program since the government introduced new standards for healthier foods last year. The new standards have been met with grumbling from school nutrition officials who say they are difficult and expensive to follow, conservatives who say the government shouldn’t be dictating what kids eat and—unsurprisingly—from some children who say the less-greasy food doesn’t taste as good. But USDA says the vast majority of schools are serving healthier food, with some success. Data the department is planning to release Monday shows that 80...

In my work, I see more people who want to focus on losing weight rather than gaining weight, so I don’t often stop to think about the problem of hunger. It’s easy to overlook the fact that hunger is still a big problem in in the United States. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2011 about 50 million Americans were living with food insecurity — 33.5 million adults and 16.7 million children. What is food insecurity? It’s the inability to provide adequate food on a consistent basis. For adults, not getting enough food can have harmful...

The detection of a small amount of genetically modified material in a Washington state farmer's non-GMO alfalfa crop constitutes a "commercial issue" only and does not warrant any government action, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Tuesday. The Washington state farmer had complained in late August to state agricultural officials that his alfalfa hay had been rejected for export sale because of the presence of a genetically modified trait that makes the crop resistant to herbicide. The event triggered a wave of concern from consumer and agricultural groups who have fought the government for nearly a decade to keep...

A meat inspection program that the Agriculture Department plans to roll out in pork plants nationwide has repeatedly failed to stop the production of contaminated meat at American and foreign plants that have already adopted the approach, documents and interviews show. The program allows meat producers to increase the speed of processing lines by as much as 20 percent and cuts the number of USDA safety inspectors at each plant in half, replacing them with private inspectors EMPLOYED BY MEAT COMPANIES. The approach has been used for more than a decade by five American hog plants under a pilot program....

A Florida Christian ministry that has been distributing food to the needy for the past 31 years said it will drop all connections with the federal USDA agriculture bureaucracy rather than bow to orders that it must remove Christian symbols from its facility. Fox News reported that officials from the Christian Service Center of Lake City (CSC), Florida, were told by the state agriculture department that in order to continue to receive food from the USDA they would have to remove portraits of Christ and a 10 Commandments display from their facility and stop giving Bibles to those who came...

Americans know the importance of forests to our communities and our economy. They provide jobs and recreational opportunities, filter our air and water, and make up essential habitat for wildlife and natural resources. But increasingly, we’re also recognizing that forests play an important role in mitigating climate change. Recently, President Obama announced a Climate Action Plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare for the impacts of climate change on our communities and economy, and lead international efforts to combat global climate change. This plan recognizes that America’s forests play a critical role in addressing carbon pollution, absorbing as much as 14...

A Florida ministry that feeds the poor said a state agriculture department official told them they would not be allowed to receive USDA food unless they removed portraits of Christ, the Ten Commandments, a banner that read “Jesus is Lord” and stopping giving Bibles to the needy.

Generations of American cooks are wrong. They learned their wrongity wrongity wrong habits from their parents, or from public television’s Julia Child. Their terrible, filthy habit is rinsing poultry before cooking. Public health experts estimate that as many as 90% of Americans do it, and they want us to cut it out. Poultry-washing makes intuitive sense: you don’t know where that bird has been or what kind of bacteria are crawling on the outside. Julia Child herself admitted that washing a chicken before roasting it felt cleaner, even if the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the government agency in charge of...

With each passing day, it seems the United States of America, “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” is becoming more and more like the Communist Russia I learned about in elementary school where people weren’t allowed to grow their own food unless the State “allowed” it. In this latest crackdown on citizens simply trying to provide for themselves using the most basic of skills – gardening – the USDA’s Rural Development Agency is forbidding Rosie, an industrious 4-year old girl in South Dakota from using a small, unused area outside her subsidized housing unit to grow green...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture made farm subsidy payments to 28,613 dead farmers between 2011 and 2012, of which 1,799 were deemed “improper,” according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued in June. The report, entitled “USDA Needs to Do More to Prevent Improper Payments to Deceased Individuals,” said USDA’s Farm Service Agency identified “thousands of deceased individuals who were paid $3.3 million in improper payments after their dates of death, of which FSA has recovered approximately $1 million.” … “Improper payments” are those sent to individuals who had not properly filed documentation and who had subsequently died, or...

With a record 101 million Americans receiving food aid from the federal government, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants more kids to be on the dole for food during the summer months. “As part of its ongoing commitment to improving access to healthy food for low income children, USDA has set a goal of serving 5 million more meals to eligible children this summer,” the agency said on Aug. 1. The agency’s goal amounts to serving 166 million meals through its Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), which already gives subsidies to 3.5 million children a day during breaks from...

First, Michelle Obama called for healthier school lunches -- and kids complained that the first lady's menus left them hungry. Now, the United States Department of Agriculture has green-lighted a pilot program to serve trendy Greek yogurt in school cafeterias in New York, Idaho, Arizona, and Tennessee. If all goes well this fall, Greek yogurt may became a staple in Washington's $11 billion school lunch program in some 100,000 schools. In one sense, it's an example of America's growing European Union-style nanny state -- not to mention crony capitalism and insider influence. Two of the biggest cheerleaders of Greek yogurt...