Posted on March 12, 2014
Food Safety Inspection Service web portal:
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/home
USDA Food Safety Inspection Service portal for recalls by year from 1994-2013:
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/recalls-and-public-health-alerts/recall-case-archive/recall-case-archive-2013-new
FDA food recalls for week of March 5, 2014:
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/enforcement/enforce_rpt-Product-Tabs.cfm?action=Expand+Index&w=03052014%E2%9F%A8=eng#food
Diseases, hospitalizations, deaths by foodborne illness:
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsFoodborneEstimates/
Anti-poultry rule letter to The White House:
HIMP_Sign_On_Letter
Posted on March 7, 2014
The 25th annual MOSES Organic Farming Conference, the largest organic farming conference in America, attracted about 3,400 farmers to La Crosse recently, illustrating the dramatic growth of organic agriculture. The Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) marked its 25th anniversary with contests, awards, historical exhibits and an anniversary celebration.
Keynote speaker and journalist Alan Guebert […]
Posted on March 7, 2014
The conference began a quarter-century ago with just 90 attendees, compared with the more than 3,000 organic farmers and growers who attended this year’s event. As Faye Jones, the executive director of MOSES exclaimed several times over the weekend, “This is the largest organic farming conference in the known universe!”
Organic farming is going to grow […]
Posted on February 19, 2014
72-Hour rule: http://www.gop.gov/indepth/pledge/readthebill
The House-Senate Conference Report on the Agricultural Act of 2014: http://beta.congress.gov/congressional-report/113th-congress/house-report/333/1
USDA forecasts: http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/oce-usda-agricultural-projections/oce141.aspx#.UwTBJEJdXKk
Washington Post “The Fix” Blog: Lost opportunity for Farm Bill transparency:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/02/07/a-missed-opportunity-for-transparency-with-the-farm-bill/
Previous USDA study on poultry insurance: http://www.rma.usda.gov/pubs/2011/poultryfeasibility.pdf
Posted on February 12, 2014
Click on links to view the articles.
“Meet Dr. Evil”: 60 Minutes
Coveted Washington echo chamber: NY Times
Phony non-profit: Bloomberg
Invests in front groups: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A despicable man, scoundrel: PR Watch (son David Berman)
Posted on February 5, 2014
Jan. 28, 2014 USDA Office of Inspector General Report on AMS Oversight of the Beef Checkoff:
http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/01099-0001-21.pdf
2013 AMS Report as released, later removed by USDA
USDA Notice posted after removing 2013 report from public domain
Posted on January 29, 2014
Iowa State University’s Corn Balance Sheet
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/outlook/cornbalancesheet.pdf
U.S. House of Representatives’ working draft of the 960-page 2014 Farm Bill
http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20140127/CRPT-113hrpt-HR2642.pdf
U.S. House of Representatives’ roll call vote on Agriculture Act of 2014
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2014/roll031.xml
“A Bipartisan Taxpayer Raid”
Wall Street Journal Editorial January 28, 2014
President Obama delivered his State of the Union address Tuesday night to the usual bipartisan cheers for proposals that […]
Posted on January 28, 2014
A recent article by Alan Guebert, “Big Agriculture, big data and big money,” stated that every day the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of electronic data. To put it into perspective, you would need 57.5 billion iPads (32-gigabyte memory) to hold just one day’s worth of data. Now that is big!
http://www.farmersadvance.com/article/20140129/NEWS/401290307/Big-data-informs-agriculture-management-decisions
Posted on January 22, 2014
Dante Chinni writes Politics Counts every Friday. Mr. Chinni is the director of the American Communities Project at American University, which examines different types of communities across the U.S.
It’s no secret that the current battle over the Farm Bill, which is stalled in Congress, has been a partisan slog. Democratic states and House districts, which […]
Posted on January 22, 2014
Big Data Informs Agriculture Management Decisions: Technology advances are changing the way producers look at their crops and manage each acre
Written by Marilyn Thelen, Michigan State University Extension
In the mid-1990s, I attended a large farm show with my husband where he preceded to point out all the ways data could be collected on various aspects of […]