Farm
bill failure hinged on food stamp fight [Santa Cruz Sentinel]
A
fight over food for the needy sank a long-awaited farm bill in the House on
Thursday. The five-year, $500 billion bill would have cut $2 billion annually
from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food
stamps.…Democrats who called the cuts draconian voted no along with Republicans
who argued for steeper reductions, and the bill failed, 234-195….Farmers have
been waiting for the legislation, which a divided House put off last year and
instead extended the existing bill through September. Josh Rolph, director of
the California Farm Bureau's federal policy division, said state farmers would
have benefitted from hundreds of million of dollars targeted at agricultural
research…."We are disappointed," Rolph said. "Of course, there
were things in it we didn't like, but it looks like we're back to square one.
We'll do everything we can to make sure we have a farm bill by Sept. 30,
whatever it takes."
Water
transfer moves ahead amid opposition [Chico Enterprise-Record]
A
transfer of 5,000 acre-feet of water was approved Thursday by the Board of
Directors of Glenn-Colusa Irrigation district. The vote came after
environmentalists, the Butte County Board of Supervisors and the city of Chico
asked the district to reconsider. The surface water will be purchased by San
Luis Mendota Water Authority, south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and
Glenn-Colusa growers will pump groundwater in an equal amount….Normally water
transfers in this area include farmers selling water and not planting rice. However,
the spring was historically dry this year; water transfers with land fallowing
could not be negotiated before the growing season.
Satellites
reveal depth of water depletion [San Francisco Chronicle]
Satellites
peering down on California's great Central Valley have discovered evidence that
the nation's prime food source is fast losing precious reserves of water from
the valley's underground aquifers. Loss of water from beneath the surface,
combined with increasing shortages of surface irrigation caused by climate
change, is quietly adding up to a crisis that threatens one of the state's
major industries, scientists say. "We don't recognize the dire water
situation we face," said Jay Famiglietti, a UC Irvine hydrologist who has
monitored those stored water levels every month since the spacecraft began measuring
the sources 11 years ago.
Strawberry
grower fined, ordered to destroy crop [Salinas Californian]
A
Watsonville strawberry farmer was slapped with a $15,000 fine and ordered to
till under 10 acres of crop for using an illegal, highly toxic insecticide
called methomyl. The crop was valued at $200,000. The insecticide residue was
discovered during a routine inspection by the state Department of Pesticide
Regulation at a packing house in Norwalk and traced back to V.L. Farms in
Watsonville, operated by Lorenzo Lopez, according to a settlement agreement
released Thursday by the DPR….The investigation was initiated in May after
DPR’s Residue Monitoring Program found illegal residues of methomyl on
strawberries in retail outlets. A California Department of Food and Agriculture
laboratory detected 1.44 parts per million of methomyl and began tracing the
strawberries to their origin.
U.S.
approves a label for meat from animals fed a diet free of gene-modified
products [New York Times]
The
Agriculture Department has approved a label for meat and liquid egg products
that includes a claim about the absence of genetically engineered products. It
is the first time that the department, which regulates meat and poultry
processing, has approved a non-G.M.O. label claim, which attests that meat certified
by the Non-GMO Project came from animals that never ate feed containing
genetically engineered ingredients like corn, soy and alfalfa. The U.S.D.A.’s
Food Safety Inspection Service “allows companies to demonstrate on their labels
that they meet a third-party certifying organization’s standards, provided that
the third-party organization and the company can show that the claims are
truthful, accurate and not misleading,” Cathy Cochran, a U.S.D.A. spokeswoman,
said in a statement.
Marijuana
crops in California threaten forests and wildlife [New York Times]
…Hilltops
have been leveled to make room for the crop. Bulldozers start landslides on
erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction clogs some streams with
dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by diversions. Little water is left for
salmon whose populations have been decimated by logging. And local and state
jurisdictions’ ability to deal with the problem has been hobbled by, among
other things, the drug’s murky legal status.…The environmental damage may not
be as extensive as that caused by the 19th-century diking of the Humboldt
estuary here, or 20th-century clear-cut logging, but the romantic outlaw drug
has become a destructive juggernaut, experts agree.
Ag
Today is distributed to county Farm Bureaus, CFBF directors and CFBF staff, for
information purposes, by the CFBF Communications/News Division, 916-561-5550; news@cfbf.com.
Some story links may require site registration. To be removed
from this mailing list, reply to this message and please provide your
name and e-mail address.
No comments:
Post a Comment