"Silent in flannel shirts and ponytails, farmers from Saskatchewan and South Dakota, Mississippi and Massachusetts lined the walls of a packed federal courtroom in Manhattan last week, as their lawyers told a judge that they were no longer able to keep genetically modified crops from their fields."
"An outbreak of bacterial infections on the East Coast illustrates the popularity of raw, unpasteurized milk despite strong warnings from public health officials about the potential danger."
"The U.S. Agriculture Department on Friday awarded $40.2 million in grants to farmers, ranchers and farmer-controlled rural business ventures aimed at spurring locally produced food supplies and renewable energy ventures."
Finally, after numerous delays amid allegations of political interference by people who don't want to see documented evidence of climate shifts, the wait is over. The new detailed interactive map is based on data from 1976-2005, and is the first official revision since the 1990 update.
The American Horticultural Society and the National Arbor Day Foundation offer generalized hardiness maps as a starting point, until the US Department of Agriculture gets around to unveiling its own update.
"The prickly pear cactus may not sound like a trendy cash crop, but it could become a phenomenon among farmers on the arid west side of the San Joaquin Valley."
"With the specter of past deadly poisonings, the food industry steps up its quest for clean salad greens, testing various industrial washes and other methods like ultrasound."
"Hoping to combat the growing problem of childhood obesity, the Obama administration on Wednesday announced its long-awaited changes to government-subsidized school meals, a final round of rules that adds more fruits and green vegetables to breakfasts and lunches and reduces the amount of salt and fat."
"Throughout North Dakota, little yellow flowers dot thousands of miles of roadsides. These canola plants, found along most major trucking routes, look harmless. But they are fueling a controversy: They prove that large numbers of genetically modified plants have escaped from farm fields and are now growing wild. About 80 percent of canola growing along roadsides in North Dakota contains genes that have been modified to make the plants resistant to common weed-killers."
"The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a long overdue new version of their Plant Hardiness Zone Map yesterday—the first update since 1990."
"How out of date was the 1990 map? It was based on data from 1974 to 1986. That's 26 years ago.
The new map is interactive, which is cool, and based on a much finer data scale than the old one, which is great. And guess what. It shows that things are getting warmer. The USDA managed to pretty much bury that fact in Bureaucratese in their press release ... ."
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