©iStockphoto.com/cmisje According to the New York Times, the organic milk business has gone bad in a hurry. Are you drinking less organic milk these days, serious eaters? Before we get to the reasons why these farmers are struggling, at least according to Times contributor Katie Zezima, I feel compelled to say that it's this kind of story that demonstrates why we need newspapers to endure. Because without quality institutions like the Times, with its wealth of reporters, editors, and stringers, stories like this might go unreported. Or, at the very least, they wouldn't be made available to the general public. Has anyone read about the plight of these farmers in any other consumer publication, online or in print? Now... More

Photograph by Robyn Lee The effort to nominate food policy figure Michael Pollan never got off the ground, but Pollan and his other American food thinker buds—88 in total including Alice Waters, Rick Bayless, Wendell Berry, Eric Schlosser, Dan Barber, and Marion Nestle—wrote Obama a letter, nominating some potential Secretaries of Agriculture: 1. Gus Schumacher, former Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services and former Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture (website) 2. Chuck Hassebrook, executive director, Center for Rural Affairs, Nebraska (website) 3. Sarah Vogel, former Commissioner of Agriculture for North Dakota and lawyer (Wiki page) 4. Fred Kirschenmann, organic farmer, distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Iowa, and president of the Stone... More

New York Daily News It's exactly the kind of thing you would expect to see in a county fair contest—a giant 6-foot-long zucchini. But while some farmers spend months carefully cultivating their prize-winning fruits and vegetables, a Queens woman says fertilizer, water, and a little TLC is all it took for her to grow this giant vegetable (technically an immature fruit, in proper botanical terms) in her backyard. At just over six feet, this zucchini is a foot taller than its owner Apollonia Castitlione, and it's just shy of the world record of a 7-foot, 10-inch zucchini grown in India three years ago, reports the New York Daily News. Although this zucchini could be used in a lot of... More

Photograph from iLoveButter on Flickr Organic agriculture is good for the earth, keeps soil healthy, fosters biodiversity, and recycles organic material without using any of those nasty synthetic chemicals. So if it's good for the earth, then it's good for us, right? Maybe, maybe not. We know that conventional farming leaves nasty metals like arsenic, lead, cadmium, nickel, mercury and zinc behind, but could these same toxins exist in organic soil? Yes, says Slate. Scientists have known since the 1920s that organic fertilizers used by farmers to supplement conventional systems—composted animal manure, rock phosphates, fish emulsions, guano, wood ashes, etc.—further contaminate topsoil with varying concentrations of heavy metals. Organic advocates, who rely exclusively on these fertilizers, remain well aware... More

Photograph from mattdente on Flickr Slate Magazine says: Maybe. As much as companies like Monsanto and Syngenta might position themselves as the solution to the global food crisis, Slate claims that they would have to significantly change the way they operate first. The article gives the GM industry some specific suggestions for policy change, such as no longer requiring poor farmers to buy new seeds every year, as well as increasing investment in nutritious, easy-to-grow crops like cassava, sorghum, millet, and chickpeas. Slate also urges GM companies to be more honest about the amount of time, energy, and technological development that will be necessary to achieve the kind of crop yields they're promising. Finally, the article proposes that GM companies... More

Photograph from Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr Bee rental costs may be to blame for the price of produce these days. Since honeybees started mysteriously disappearing, growers of products like pumpkins, cucumbers, and almonds have been forced to rent bees by the colony in order to pollinate their crops. Most crops require one to two beehives per acre, and each hive now costs somewhere between $10 and $180, depending on the season and the grower's intended use for the bees—a burden which is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher food prices. Not only is this a significant cost, but with scientists still perplexed as to the cause of the bee blight, there's no readily apparent solution... More

In what's essentially a rehash of a story from late February, the New York Times is reporting that honeybees are vanishing. What's new is that about 60 scientists met yesterday to figure out why. "So far, known enemies of the bee world, like the varroa mite, on their own at least, do not appear to be responsible for the unusually high losses." Researchers have turned to bee autopsies and genetic testing to unlock the mystery and have found the "unusual" presence of fungi also found in humans suffering from AIDS or cancer. The insects' disappearance has much to do with our food supply: "They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts." Photograph from ndrwfgg... More