Yes, we have a lot of cows. Thus the cheese, and cheeseheads. We also see a lot of beef. Hamburgers, meatloaf, casserole, steak. Grain-fed, industrial-raised beef. It’s delicious, I know. But I don’t eat it. I can’t afford it. And…

Wisconsinites are proud of their milk. I didn’t realize until I moved away that Wisconsin really has the best dairy products – fresh milk, cheddar cheese, ice cream and frozen custards… But this industry is in serious distress. “Dairy giants”…

Sure, buying local is getting big, but even I didn’t think corporations would begin attempts to profit off it so soon. Call me naive. Here is a section from an excellent article about the co-optation of local. Even Wal-Mart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say, “Local.”

South African farmers suffered million of dollars in lost income when 82,000 hectares of GMO maize failed to produce hardly any seeds. “Monsanto says they just made a mistake in the laboratory ; but we are saying that is (a general) biotechnology failure. You cannot make a mistake with three different varieties of corn”, those were the words of Mariam Mayet.

This coming Sunday, the lectionary brings us round to one of the most important teachings about Jesus that we can find in the Gospels: When hungry people are around Jesus, they get to eat till they are full. They also…

My husband’s mother lives with a diagnoses of celiac disease. This means she doesn’t eat anything that has gluten – which can be found in wheat, rye, or barley. Personally, I’m a big fan of gluten and I add gluten…

ABC News Video comes from City Farmer News (based in Vancouver, Canada) whose main web site Urban Agriculture Notes (www.cityfarmer.org) has hundreds of pages of information about city farming. Published since 1994, it was the first web site on the Internet to promote urban farming. City Farmer teaches people how to grow food in the city, compost their waste and take care of their home landscape in an environmentally responsible way. If you are lucky enough to get to Vancouver, you can visit the staff at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden, 2150 Maple Street, and see how they take care of the urban landscape. You can see their compost toilet, green roof, cob shed, organic food garden, permeable lane, natural lawn, waterwise garden, worm and backyard composter and more.

Pesticides …on our food, even after washing; …in our bodies, for years; …& in our environment, traveling many miles on wind, water and dust. What’s On My Food? is a searchable database designed to make the public problem of pesticide exposure visible and more understandable. How does this tool work? We link pesticide food residue data with the toxicology for each chemical, making this information easily searchable for the first time.

Violent clashes between Peruvian police and indigenous protesters in the region of Bagua, Peru this past week. The indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon are protesting because of fast-track decrees that allow the entrance of extractive industries to their native…

There have been many warnings from our past about the looming threat of pandemic influenza emerging from large-scale hog operations. It now appears that six of the eight genetic components in the currently circulating virus are direct descendants of a swine flu virus that first emerged in North Carolina a decade ago. That bug was discovered in August 1998, at a 2,400-head breeding facility in Newton Grove, NC, where all the sows suddenly came down with a phlegmatic cough. Pregnant animals spontaneously aborted their litters.