Building Community Food & Hitting a Wall

Building Community Food & Hitting a Wall

Building Community Food & Hitting a Wall plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

The USDA has awarded 27 grants including two in Oregon to organizations to build community food systems and fight hunger and food insecurity. Community Food Security Coalition in Portland has recieved $250,000 and Friends of Zenger Farm also in Portland received $187,860. The awards were made by USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) through its Community Food Projects program.

President Obama’s proposed cuts to crop insurance in his fiscal 2013 budget request hit a brick wall during the Senate Ag Committee’s first formal farm bill hearing this year. Ag senators from both parties told Ag Secretary Vilsack that Cutting crop insurance 8-billion dollars more after an earlier 6-billion reduction at a time other farm programs like direct payments are about to disappear is not a good move. Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow called crop insurance a cornerstone.

STABENOW: We’ve heard across the country from our field hearing in Michigan to Kansas to people coming in and speaking with us here how critical crop insurance is so we need you to speak to the present proposals on cuts in farm programs and particularly concerned about crop insurance.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

Companies like McDonalds try make decisions in the best interests of their businesses, even it seems when it comes to caving under pressure from the HSUS; as evident from McDonalds announcement earlier this week that it will now be requiring its pork suppliers to phase out gestation stalls, a method of housing pregnant sows in individual enclosures rather than group pens. But in all the HSUS created hoopla has anyone really considered what is best for the pigs? Yes, that would be the farmers that have now come under fire for how they treat animals under their care. The “animal nirvana” that the HSUS would like us all to subscribe to just doesn’t exist in the real world, and farmers are more aware of this than anyone. They’re the ones who have seen pigs fighting with other pigs, and the stress that can have on the more submissive animals within the group. As it is in the human world, so it is with animals, there will always be bullies that trample on the weaker members. The HSUS is fond of stating that people need to “better understand the ag industry’s animal rearing techniques”. What better place to start than within the HSUS organization itself?

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. 

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