Vilsack: Biotech will solve our ag problems
Grist - 4/21/2009. By Tom Philpott – USDA chief Tom Vilsack has been in Italy at the G8 meeting, talking ag policy with reporters. As the global hunger crisis lingers and climate-change and population fears fester, Vilsack is using the opportunity to push agri-biotech as the solution to the globe’s food needs. ... A few days earlier, Vilsack weighed in on a key debate in global food policy: the need for organized government grain reserves. |
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Beekeeping business humming in Mainers’ backyards
Bangor Daily News - 4/20/2009. By Walter Griffin – Tending honeybees is a booming business these days as more Mainers take up raising their own hives. Attendance at beekeeping schools is on the rise as raising honeybees has captivated both rural and urban communities. “Backyard beekeeping is very much alive and well in Maine,” trumpeted Jean Vose. “Every bee school in Maine has doubled their capacity in the past year. It’s refreshing and it’s heart-warming that we have so much interest in bees today.” |
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Waste not, want not
Common Dreams - 4/20/2009.By Bill McKibben – Once a year or so, it's my turn to run recycling day for our tiny town. Saturday morning, 9 to 12, a steady stream of people show up to sort out their plastics (No. 1, No. 2, etc.), their corrugated cardboard (flattened, please), their glass (and their returnable glass, which goes to benefit the elementary school), their Styrofoam peanuts, their paper, their cans. It's quite satisfying – everything in its place. But it's also kind of disturbing, this waste stream. |
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Is local food better? Yes, but there’s more
Common Dreams - 4/20/2009.By Sarah DeWeerdt – In 1993, a Swedish researcher calculated that the ingredients of a typical Swedish breakfast – apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream, orange juice, sugar – traveled a distance equal to the circumference of the Earth before reaching the Scandinavian table. In 2005, a researcher in Iowa found that the milk, sugar, and strawberries that go into a carton of strawberry yogurt collectively journeyed 2,211 miles (3,558 kilometers) just to get to the processing plant. |
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