Posts Tagged sustainable farming

Sorry, NY Times: GMOs still won’t save the world

“With all due respect, Nina Federoff’s New York Times op-ed reads like it was written two decades ago, when the jury was still out about the potential of the biotech industry to reduce hunger, increase nutritional quality in foods, and decrease agriculture’s reliance on toxic chemicals and other expensive inputs that most of the world’s farmers can’t afford.

With more than 15 years of commercialized GMOs behind us, we know not to believe these promises any longer.

Around the world, from the Government Office for Science in the U.K. to the National Research Council in the United States to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., there is consensus: In order to address the roots of hunger today and build a food system that will feed humanity into the future, we must invest in “sustainable intensification”—not expensive GMO technology that threatens biodiversity, has never proven its superiority, even in yields, and locks us into dependence on fossil fuels, fossil water, and agrochemicals.”

Sorry, NY Times: GMOs still won’t save the world via Anna Lappe – Grist

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Elmwood Activist to speak on factory farms

Karen Hudson will address conference in New York that will be webcast

February 8, 2011

Article by Terry Bibo – Available in Print Edition of the Peoria Journal Star

Elmwood—Polluted Air, Polluted water, Antibiotic resistant bacteria. These things can be “the invisible price tag of industrial agriculture,” acdording to Karen Hudson, the Elmwood- based sustainable farming activist.

People are beginning to open their eyes and see that’s not the kind of agriculture they want.” Hudson said Monday. “Our project is reclaiming agriculture.” As President of Dairy Education Alliance and FARM Families Against Rural Messes (FARM) Hudson will speak at 9:30 a.m. Saturday at TEDx Manhattan “Changing the Way We Eat” in New York City.  The all-day conference will be webscast live at www.livestream.com/tedx. More than 60 viewing parties have been confirmed worldwide; a worldwide map is available at www.tedxmanhattan.org/.

TED is a 25 year old not -for -profit organization that “supports world changing ideas with multiple initiatives” through conferences that have featured speakers from Bill Gates to Sir Richard Branson. TEDx events are similar, self-organized events. The lead sponsor for this one is the Glynwood Institute for Sustainable Food and Farming.

“We chose Karen Hudson to be a TEDx Manhattan speaker because she is one of the top anti-factory farm activists in this country,” said Diane Hatz, TEDx Glynwood co-founder and director, via email.  “She not only is an expert n confinement facilities, she has first hand knowledge of what happens when one moves into an area.”

Hudson said a portion of her talk will focus on the way huge confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) can take a tremendous toll on the land and drive smaller-based farms out of business.  In Elmwood, the manure lagoons breached in 2001 and caused one of hte state’s largest environmental disasters.

“My focus is that at all of these fafcilities manure becomes a liability, not a nutrient source for cropland,” Hudson said. “CAFO 101- that’s what happpened to us.”

Over the past ten yearsthe groups that have fought those factory farms have evolved into a 30- county coalition called Illinois Citizens for Clean Air and Water.

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Socially Responsible Agricultural Project

The Socially Responsible Agricultural Project educates the public about the problems caused by factory farms, works to help communities protect themselves from the devastating impacts of these facilities while, at the same time, providing help and guidance for those who are trying to reclaim agriculture by producing and marketing sustainable agricultural goods.

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