Food News

Subsidizing the National Breadbasket
By Abby Youngblood and Ed Yowell

A Little Farm Subsidy History
During the Great Depression, rural poverty and non-rural hunger were profound.  The nation’s first Farm Bill, the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, was a part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.  In it, commodity crop-specific price and income support programs were established to assist farmers economically and to help feed the hungry.  Since that time, these supports have been a core part of agricultural policy in the United States, comprising the most significant portion of the “farm safety net.”  Successive Farm Bills, from the second, the 1936 Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, to the most recent, the 2008 Food, Conservation, and Energy Act, perpetuated the farm safety net.  However, both the structure of the farm safety net and scale and character of farming in the United States have changed dramatically since the first farm bill was introduced in 1933.  

The original farm safety net helped support the small, labor intensive, diversified farms that then characterized farming in the United States.  The 1936 Farm Bill linked commodity programs and soil conservation and encouraged farmers to idle some of their land to avoid overproduction.  The following Farm Bills, of 1949, 1954, and 1956, continued to rely on price supports and supply control (farmers being paid to leave land unused or to put crops into storage).  However, since World War II, farming changed in a number of ways: 

Assembled by the FSNYC Communications Committee
Edited by: Hans Bernier

Over the summer the New York City Council introduced 5 pieces of
legislation that will hopefully change the way city looks at its food.
As stated in its press release, the new FoodWorks Bill:

“aims to encourage regional farming, facilitate the identification of city property for gardens or agricultural use and decrease the city’s waste and energy usage, while also increasing the transparency of the city’s progress toward better nutritional outcomes and public health.”

The FSNYC Communications Committee recently corresponded with Alissa Weiss a Senior Policy Analyst with Speaker Christine Quinn’s office. The communications committee assembled a set of questions regarding the legislations impact and how it will be implemented on the ground. We want to thank Senior Analyst Weiss for taking the time to answer our inquiries thoroughly and honestly.

Anne Saxelby explains the impetus behind Heritage Foods USA's No Goat Left Behind initiative.

by Gabrielle Blavatsky

Last month, Heritage Foods USA-purveyors of sustainable and humanely raised heritage meats- launched the No Goat Left Behind campaign. In partnership with fifteen family farmers, the organization is working to bring goat meat into homes and restaurants across the nation. The No Goat Left Behind project was designed both to market goat as a viable meat product in the United States and help dairy farmers with extra male goats earn additional income.

There is an often-unrecognized link between the meat and dairy industries. In order to produce milk, a female goat (or cow) has to give birth. As nature would have it, half of these babies are male and half are female. Females are kept by the dairy farmer and eventually introduced into the milking population. Unable to produce milk, male goats are either killed at birth or sold at auction for next to nothing. Unlike cows, goats do not fair well in confinement and can’t subsist off of a grain diet. In addition, for weeks after they are born, goats must be fed milk or costly milk alternative that is usually administered by hand. These onerous requirements currently make raising male goats extremely expensive for farmers. 

Eating goat is not as unusual as it sounds. In fact, goat is the most widely consumed protein in the world. According Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough—authors of Goats Meat, Milk, Cheese, 70% of the red meat eaten across the world is goat meat. This global trend has been catching on in the United States as well. Nonetheless, the USDA reports that the number of goats slaughtered has doubled every 10 years for the past three decades. In fact, American farmers currently slaughter almost 800,000 meat goats a year.  This growth is a by-product of the development of the dairy goat industry for cheese.

By Kerry Trueman

reblogged with permission from the author from Civil Eats

October 20th, 2011- Two miles north of Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street‘s encamped, there’s another would-be hotspot of cultural change occupying a more genteel locale: the James Beard Foundation (JBF). Seriously? This epicurean epicenter housed in an elegant West Village brownstone with eternally well-tended window boxes, wants to stir up something more culturally significant than mouth-watering meals curated by celebrity chefs?

Well, yes. And it’s a logical move, if they don’t want to see their legacy (or their democracy) go down the toilet. After all, as Mario Batali once pointed out on CBS Sunday Morning, “When you think about it, all my greatest work is poop, tomorrow.”Ah, but not all excrement is created equal. On the one hand, intensive pork production’s given us vast pools of lethally toxic pig poop known as manure lagoons, more akin to radioactive waste than organic manure. On the other hand, there are worm castings, the highly fertile poop extruded by earthworms that looks like coffee grounds and smells pleasantly earthy.

The respective hazards and merits of various manures has not, historically, been the province of the JBF. This highly influential culinary center, founded after the legendary chef and cookbook author James Beard’s death in 1985 at the age of 81, is better known for its awards honoring outstanding chefs, restaurateurs, and writers.

But with the current American diet in such a dire state, the JBF folks are not content to simply celebrate culinary and literary excellence. Eager to play a more proactive role in reshaping our food system, the JBF has come down squarely in favor of a future that features more worm castings and fewer manure lagoons.