Growers and Grocers

Some time ago, the Gadling travel blog introduced me to a fascinating web site called Worldmapper, redraws world maps, adjusting the size of each country for a certain piece of data, like population or energy consumption. Worldmapper is a collaboration between The University of Sheffield and the University of Michigan. Worldmapper has […]

On February 2nd, forty farming, environmental and other groups sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-NV) and Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) requesting that the Budget Committee authorize sufficient funds to create a Farm Bill that will “provide a safety net for our agricultural producers, expand production of renewable energy, protect our natural resources, […]

Last week the Government Accountability Office released their 2007 High Risk Update, which focuses on federal programs that are “high risk due to their greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” The 2007 update includes three new high risk areas: transportation financing and capacity, protection of technologies critical to U.S. national security, and […]

On Wednesday morning, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns released the USDA’s proposals for the farm bill.
USDA began preparations for the 2007 farm bill in 2005 by conducting 52 Farm Bill Forums across the country. More than 4,000 comments were recorded or collected during forums and via electronic and standard mail. These comments are summarized in […]

The House Committee on Agriculture will take the lead in drafting the next Farm Bill, with the House Committee on the Budget and the House Committee on Appropriations also playing important roles in determining how much can be spent and allocating the funds. The new members of the Agriculture Committee for the 110th Congress […]

These days, most disposable eating utensils are made out of plastic, a material made from petroleum and with a lifetime of thousands of years. Excellent Packaging & Supply, a company based in the San Francisco Bay Area (Richmond), is trying to banish petroleum-based plastics from dining hall, restaurants, picnic, and elsewhere with their line of […]

The 110th United States Congress started work on January 2, 2007, and committee assignments in the Senate were recently finalized. The Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee will have a significant impact on the shape of the next Farm Bill, as will the Senate Budget Committee and the House counterparts. The overall shape […]

Photo credit: Soybean photo is from the USDA’s ARS Image Gallery.
The January 2007 National Geographic magazine has a thought-provoking story about one of the most intense pressures on the Amazon rainforest: large-scale industrial agriculture. Last of the Amazon visits the lands around Brazil’s BR-163 road (the “soy highway”) and finds a region in […]

I first discovered yuzu (C. junos, or C. ichangensis X C. reticulata var. austera) when my brother brought me a jar of yuzu marmalade from Japan. Yuzu is the Japanese word for the fruit; it’s known as yuja in Korean. This round Asian citrus has a distinctive flavor that is somewhere between lemon and orange. […]

The FDA has tentatively declared that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe (FDA release, NY Times article in the SF Chronicle, Washington Post article). A few commentators (The Accidental Hedonist and Life Begins at 30, for example) have attacked the FDA’s initial position to not require labels on products deriving from cloned animals. […]