By Wenonah Hauter In 2008, Cabot Oil and Gas started fracking operations in Dimock, Pennsylvania. It was around that time the community started noticing their water was turning brown and making people and animals sick. One woman’s water well exploded. Fracking had come to town. It’s a familiar story in other rural communities—from Pennsylvania to […]
By Katherine Paul A citizen-led group in Nebraska is fighting Costco’s plan to build a huge chicken factory farm operation that residents in nearby cities say would pollute their drinking water. Residents of Devils Lake, North Dakota, along with members of the Spirit Lake Nation Tribe are battling plans to build a hog CAFO in […]
By Jessica Corbett More than 50 groups are demanding that Iowa lawmakers urgently pass landmark legislation to enact a moratorium on factory farm expansion in a state that is home to more than 10,000 of them. “Across the nation, factory farming destroys communities and contaminates drinking water supplies and air quality,” said Krissy Kasserman, the […]
By George Kimbrell One year down, three to go. Trump and his enablers are hell bent on destroying or selling to the highest bidder the federal agencies they are charged with running in the public interest. In the past year, they have been unrelenting in their attacks on food safety, environmental protections, climate change, government […]
Ready for some inspiration? Check out this video of a press conference that took place earlier this month in Iowa. The conference begins with the powerful voice of Diane Rosenberg, executive director of Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors. Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors is a member of the Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture, a coalition […]
By Dan Nosowitz Food safety concerns have been ratcheting up lately: major outbreaks of salmonella, listeria and other food-borne bacteria seem to be on the rise. Given that, you might expect any changes in federal oversight to work toward fixing that. Not so fast! On Jan. 19, the USDA announced a proposal to “modernize swine […]
By Dan Nosowitz On Jan. 16, some of the country’s leading producers, retailers and certifiers in the organic food space took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post to publish an open letter. The letter, which you can read here, attacks the Trump administration’s decision to nix the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices rule […]
By Rachel Krantz For most of my life, I genuinely believed the false advertising used to sell dairy. When I learned the truth—that nearly all cows used for dairy are kept inside, locked up, forcibly inseminated, and hooked up to painful milking machines—I was heartbroken. How had I never put two and two together: that […]
By Katherine Paul and Alexis Baden-Mayer If nutritional quality and animal welfare issues factor into your egg-buying decisions, get ready for more bad news out of the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The USDA plans to ditch rules, finalized under the Obama administration, that would have required organic egg producers to provide hens […]