Farmers
protest new rules on water quality [Stockton Record]
Farmers
protested new water-quality regulations Thursday, saying the proposed rules
would bury them in paperwork and chisel away at their profits without
necessarily improving pollution. Close to 300 people, most of them growers,
showed up at the Robert J. Cabral Agricultural Center for a meeting with state
officials….Farmers would have to write plans detailing how they will apply
fertilizer to their fields….The fertilizer plans would have to be certified by
an expert. Farm management plans and erosion plans would also be
required…."All these costs just start exploding," said Jack Hamm,
president of the San Joaquin Farm Bureau Federation.
UFW
spearheads local immigration reform effort [Salinas Californian]
Before
the sun rises this morning, more than 20 volunteers from the United Farm
Workers will be in the fields of Salinas Valley, speaking to farm workers
before their shifts about the importance of immigration reform. The UFW’s
three-day campaign is linked to hundreds of efforts across the country marking
the fifth “National Day for Dignity and Respect” Saturday….The volunteers hope
to contact workers at 30 to 35 farms by Saturday, gathering as many as 2,500
signatures to send to Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) advocating
legislation that allows some 11 million people to work toward citizenship,
Barajas said.
Commentary: Help us, Jerry
Brown [Wall Street Journal]
Nearly
forty years ago under Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, California established an
Agricultural Labor Relations Board to protect farm workers' rights. In another
sign of how much the Golden State has since changed, hundreds of farm workers
are now petitioning Mr. Brown, who is once again governor, for protection
against the farm board and union. Eight buses of Gerawan farm workers from the
Fresno region arrived in Sacramento on Wednesday to protest the farm board's
rejection of their petition to decertify the United Farm Workers union….All
workers are asking for is the opportunity to vote by secret ballot over whether
they want to be represented by the United Farm Workers. What is the union and
farm board afraid of?
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Glowing
plant project on Kickstarter sparks debate about regulation of DNA modification
[Washington Post]
Hunkered
down in a converted shipping container stationed in a San Francisco parking
lot, three young entrepreneurs are tinkering with the DNA of ordinary plants in
the hopes of being able to mass produce a variety that glows in the dark. If
all goes well, their start-up company will begin mailing out the first batch of
seeds next spring to the 8,000 donors across the country who helped them raise
nearly $500,000 in a phenomenally successful online fundraising campaign
through Kickstarter. The distribution of an estimated 600,000 seeds would be,
by far, the largest release of a synthetically engineered organism to the
general public….It is an event that supporters are looking forward to with
giddy excitement but also one that has sparked worry in Washington about
whether existing laws and statutes are adequate if something goes wrong and the
seeds upset the balance of the environment.
Editorial: Beware the
clear-cutters [Los Angeles Times]
Even
before the embers from the Rim fire had stopped smoldering, the House of
Representatives was using the catastrophic forest fire as an excuse to pass a
harmful logging bill. HR 1526, the so-called Restoring Healthy Forests for
Healthy Communities Act written by Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), would mandate
that logging more than double in national forests and would require foresters
to show that they had met certain timber quotas without regard for whether the
forests involved were habitats for threatened species or whether they were in
supposedly protected roadless areas….There are smart ways to allow increased
logging on federal lands so that it not only benefits the timber industry but
also reduces the risk of conflagrations….But the Restoring Healthy Forests legislation
includes none of these.
Editorial: Sierra Pacific
still investing in timber future [Redding Record]
For
two decades now, the timber industry in Northern California has been in
seemingly uninterrupted decline while trains loaded with Canadian 2-by-4’s pass
through on their way to build Riverside County suburbs and our forests
increasingly are going up in smoke. And yet who’s laying down serious money on
the future? California’s largest timber company. Sierra Pacific Industries, one
of the last big players standing in the state’s logging and milling trade,
announced this week that it will rebuild its large-log mill in Quincy, the
little mill town up in the Sierra Nevada east of Chico….As for the future of
timber in California, the company is the largest single private landowner but
still has to navigate environmental rules that make land management complex and
costly, and much of the northern Sierra is national forest where commercial
logging is a low priority.
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