January 31, 2010 Good news for the Wallace Center in Little Rock, AR. They have been awarded a $900,000 grant by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to help run the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center (HUFED). “The purpose of the HUFED Center grant program is to establish and support a Healthy […]
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Obama Nominates New Undersecretary for Food Safety
January 25, 2010 From the Obama Foodorama blog: “President Obama today announced his intent to nominate Dr. Elisabeth Hagen as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Under Secretary for Food Safety. Hagen will serve with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.” h/t @obamafoodorama Go to Original Post…
Agriculture Secretary Vilsack announces $310 million in Recovery Act funds for rural broadband projects
January 25, 2010 “Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the selection of fourteen Recovery Act Broadband Infrastructure projects that will receive $309,923,352 through funding made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. An additional $3,551,887 in private investment brings the total to $313,475,239. Altogether, Congress awarded USDA $2.5 billion in Recovery Act funding to […]
Dr. John Boyd on Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Farmers, and President Obama
January 18, 2010 In 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a letter to the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy, asking for changes in the USDA: “The department could be of tremendous assistance to Negro farmers who are now denied credit simply because of their desire to exercise their citizenship rights. To wipe out […]
The Organic Community, the USDA, and the Morning After
Part 5: Today’s discussion will pick up in the light of the morning after and the reservations – felt to this day – whether hooking up with Uncle Sam turned out to be as advantageous as hoped. A healthy match between the two has always been a tricky proposition, given the USDA’s top-down approach to decision making and the organic community’s commitment to consensus process.
Genesis of the USDA’s National Organic Program
Part 4: Organic agriculture was becoming pretty big business, considering that the people making it happen had started out with little more than determination. The organic community – meaning the extended family of farmers, certifying agents, natural food merchandisers, environmentalists and consumers – recognized that some harmony and reciprocity between the dozens of regional certification standards was needed to avoid a Tower of Babel.
The Organic Certification Process: Early Beginnings
Part 3: Despite a perpetual cold shoulder from the land grant agricultural establishment and the commercial food industry, organic agriculture grew steadily if silently during the 1980s. Each regional farmer group developed its own set of standards that specified the conditions with which a farmer must comply for their farm and the food it produced to be certified, labeled and sold as organic.
Added Value: Direct Marketing for Farmers and Ranchers (Video)
The Imperial Stock Ranch, which began in 1871, faces a new and serious challenge to its very survival: how to create new markets for its products to compensate for longstanding existing markets that have declined or shifted overseas. Some bold steps were needed to rethink what to do with the wool from the sheep they raise on their 30,000 acre ranch in Eastern Oregon. Their solution? Direct, value-added marketing to yarn retailers and apparel designers.
FDA Expands Peanut Butter Products Recall In Latest Salmonella Scare
In salmonella scare, contamination outbreak underscores urgent need for restructuring of the nation’s food safety regulations, enforcement, and oversight authority.
