Theme: policy

News from the Farm | May 26, 2014

May 26, 2014

Farmers all over California are weighing their summer water options.  Some, for example, on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, will fallow all of their land for lack of water.  Others (like Full Belly) have access to groundwater, and will irrigate only higher value crops, and choose to grow less in certain fields or reduce water use later in the season.   

In declaring a drought emergency, Governor Brown called out the likely connection between the drought and climate change.  I recently asked a friend if the farmers in his neighborhood talked about the drought in those terms and he replied that while they may or may not think about the impact of climate change, what they worry about more is the impact of regulations that will be imposed on agriculture in the name of addressing climate change! [Read more…]

News From the Farm | Week of October 21, 2013

October 21, 2013

Please submit comments on the proposed FDA Produce Rule

During the last year, we have written about the proposed “food safety” regulations many times.  Now we ask every single one of our members to please submit your comments to the FDA. The deadline is November 15th. If these proposals go forward, they will require costly changes in production practices with little scientific justification and doubtful reduction in food poisoning outbreaks. Based on previous history with implementation of “food safety” regulations in the 1980’s, many family farmers will go out of business, and others will stop growing certain crops once full implementation takes place. Please take a few minutes to submit comments! We have been to FDA hearings and we do think that they might pay attention. The FDA is staffed by people who know little about agriculture. Those of you who are in touch with a local farm may have more expertise than many of them, especially if you read this newsletter regularly!

The web site of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (http://caff.org/programs/foodsafety/fsma/) has all the helpful information that you might need, including instructions on How to Comment. There are two proposed rules. The rule that we have been writing to you about is the “Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, Packing, and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption.” If you want to go straight to the comment site: (http://www.regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=FDA-2011-N-0921-0199).   [Read more…]

News From the Farm | Week of July 1, 2013

July 1, 2013

The rainy days of last week have been replaced with one of the widest temperature swings in memory. The 42°difference between 70° and 112° has been mind numbing without the gradual swing that allows a body to acclimate. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are forecast to be 116° at the farm. This high has extended throughout California and into the deserts of Arizona where farm fields were closer to 120°.

[Read more…]

News From the Farm | Week of June 10, 2013

June 10, 2013

CSA members may be interested to know about a bill making its way through the California State Senate that would regulate CSAs for the first time.  Before getting worried, take note that the legislation became necessary because Environmental Health Departments up and down the state became aware of the existence of CSAs and realized that most of the CSAs in California do not have permits and were not regulated in any way.  Since Federal law requires that all food put into commerce must come from an “approved source,” Environmental Health Departments determined that CSAs were not approved sources and started trying to regulate some of their activities.

Luckily, CSA farmers started calling Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) and for the last two years, legislation (AB 224) has been in development with the goal of protecting CSAs from unnecessary interference. In order to do so, the bill had to define CSA, and says (slightly paraphrased), “CSA means a program under which a registered California direct marketing producer, or a group of them grow food for a group of California consumers shareholders or subscribers who pledge or contract to buy, on a prepayment basis, a portion of the crop.”  

[Read more…]

News from the Farm | April 8, 2013

April 8, 2013

When I first heard the term “food safety” I knew that even the term itself was a problem, representing an approach to our food that calls lettuce bathed in chlorine “safe” and lettuce with a speck of dirt on it “contaminated.”  Now, a few years later, years during which we have been trying to develop a reasonable Full Belly solution to the “food safety” demands, it is still easy to characterize “food safety” discussions using opposites and absolutes — industrialized, chemical-laden, sterile approaches to the food system on the one hand, and agrarian, biologically-based, ecological approaches to the food system on the other. 

Family farmers knew that the discussion was going to be a difficult one when it started in earnest several years ago and they saw many of the organizations that should have been their friends melting away and coming out in favor of the chlorinated-food approach. Saying that you didn’t want to bathe your food in chlorine was held to be tantamount to saying that you wanted to kill young babies with their spinach smoothies. No one wanted to be critical of “safe food.”

[Read more…]

News From the Farm | November 29, 2012

December 4, 2012

Zero Hunger Challenge

Our refrigerator offers leftovers, several days after our Thanksgiving feast. We’re still enjoying roasted vegetables, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. But this isn’t altogether unfamiliar – our Thanksgiving feast is only different in terms of scale – the farm always provides such abundant quantities of food that it’s hard to imagine going hungry for very long.

Generalizing beyond the farm, our country is blessed with some of the best farmland in the world, and immense agricultural capacity. Thus it is startling that we have one of the highest poverty rates in the industrialized world, and one of the highest child mortality rates. We live in a wealthy, bountiful country where 1 in every 3 children are reliant on SNAP (food stamps) to purchase food.

[Read more…]

« Previous Page