It's only January, and the organic industry is already having a bad year. Not only have producers been losing consumers due to the hefty price tag of organic food, but the industry has struggled to maintain its integrity.
With organic feed prices at an all-time high, farmers in the UK are lobbying the government to temporarily relax organic feed standards to assist livestock producers who are currently paying twice as much for organic feed as they would conventional.
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Yesterday, California passed the most far-reaching farm animal treatment measure to ever be placed on the ballot.
Proposition 2 passed with an estimated 62 percent of the vote in early returns and will affect 20 million farm animals in California, America's largest agricultural state. It requires farmers to give animals space to turn around, spread their wings, stand up, and lie down.
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Animal-rights activism group PETA has come out with yet another inflammatory campaign. This year, they kicked their off Halloween festivities a few weeks early: On Saturday, more than 100 people gathered outside a Herald Square KFC dressed as blood-drenched zombies, holding signs that said, "I'd rather be dead than eat at KFC!"
The protest was part of the Kentucky Fried Cruelty campaign, which addresses concerns about KFC suppliers' treatment of chickens on farms and slaughterhouses.
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Animal rights activists PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has released a highly unsettling, undercover video that shows the mishandling of pigs on an Iowa farm. Among other things, in the clip — which I couldn't watch all the way through — workers hit female pigs with metal rods and slam piglets on a concrete floor. The farm supplies pigs for pork giant Hormel, who has acknowledged the abuses as "completely unacceptable."
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Tomatoes took the rap for the recent Salmonella outbreak for weeks — and now that it looks like it's been traced to the spicier serrano pepper (linked to 1,300 infections in 43 states), tomato growers are understandably hot under the collar. Since the FDA announced that certain tomatoes shouldn't be eaten, the advisory that lasted from June 7 to July 17 cost growers $100 million.
Growers say the advisory came without consulting them, and that the investigation was conducted poorly (indeed, batteries of tests didn't find a single domestic tomato with the bacteria).
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Farms Sprout in Suburbia
The Wall Street Journal's "Green Acres II: When Neighbors Become Farmers" reports that a growing number of Americans are "turning grass into edible greens and maybe even greenbacks," by growing food in their front and backyards. Since 2006, in Boulder, CO, school-bus driver Kipp Nash has "uprooted his backyard and the front or backyards of eight of his Boulder neighbors," and spent his afternoons "planting, watering, and tending" these minifarms, growing vegetables like tomatoes, bok choy, garlic, and beets.
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The other day, CasaSugar tipped me off to a really cool organization called Outstanding in the Field. Their whole purpose is to dine at the source, right on the fields that deliver the harvest. Back in 1999, chef Jim Denevan — who also happens to be a well-respected artist — began staging dinners at organic farms around Santa Cruz, Calif. 
There's a little olive tree in my mom's backyard; the harvest isn't huge, but it allows her to create her own style of pickled olives and oils. If her olive harvest has you feeling jealous, then listen up and adopt your own olive tree. For £65 (~$130), the Nudo olive grove in Le Marche, Italy, lets folks "adopt" a tree for a year.
Summer is here and one of my favorite things to do is go to the farmers market. I love to support local farms, and I feel good knowing where my produce came from.
What are the benefits of buying local produce?
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