OH YES, YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE - THE DEPT OF JUSTICE WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU

LINK The DOJ will be holding antitrust hearings and workshops in 2010 all over the country on the subject of the control of US food and food production by 3 or 4 multinational corporations. Justice wants to hear from you by Dec 31 - NOW - and they are listening.
Call a friend - Get together, and write a letter.
Here is the link to get your statement to the Department of Justice. If you saw "Food, Inc.", or have read this page, you know this is critical. Please pass it on, especially to friends who are farmers. We do have the power to make change. Let's do it.

...And if you want to know what is in the food you buy - look at the address on anything packaged, & write or call the company. Tell them if you don't want genetically modified, irradiated, nano-particle altered, or chemically treated ingredients in your food.
Tell them if you want the food labeled to reflect that. THEY WILL LISTEN.
Get together and do it with your friends, or club, or coworkers, or church. Start with that package of corn tortillas and that box of soymilk, and do it now. You do have power!


Photos courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. Top: Tim McCabe,
center: Bob Nichols. Bottom photo: courtesy NRCS

Food Safety & Good News (updated 12/15 with news from Food & Water Watch))

Read very Good news below, coming from California, Hawaii, France, and Ireland -

First - quite important "food safety enhancement" House and Senate bills 510 & 2749. Please read the updated info in Nov. 10 post just below. Skim down to the red text if you have to, but please read it, it's very important.
Photos above & below, Island grown squash and sweet carrots , Linda Degnan Cobos

So, some good news about "Monsanto Laws" and small farmers targeted by them comes in the form of California's new AB 541, signed into law last year by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and supported by organizations across the political spectrum. The law not only begins to protect farmers, but also demonstrates there is a real need for such protection.

Food & Water Watch has an action alert about antitrust hearings the Obama Aministration is said to have scheduled to examine the corporate control of food.

Read about that here.
For a great article on family farmers, Monsanto, and our food safety, read this well researched 2008 article from Vanity Fair - here. More on these difficulties faced by small US farmers here and here.
This just in from our friend Becky Bolt -
France's Supreme Court has ruled that Monsanto has given false information about the safety of it's best-selling weed-killer, Roundup.
France's highest court upheld two earlier convictions against Monsanto - by the Lyon criminal court in 2007, and the Lyon court of appeal in 2008.
Background from the BBC: “French environmental groups had brought the case in 2001 on the basis that glyphosate, Roundup's main ingredient, is classed as "dangerous for the environment" by the European Union.”

More good news - Read about Hawaii's 2009 ban on GMO taro, and the Sept. '09 U.S. ruling banning GMO sugar beets. More about the many GMO crops grown in Hawaii, from Scientific American magazine, here, it will blow your mind.
Ireland has a new ban on GMO crops. Go here for more on that.
To get a updated list showing what products in your market have genetically modified ingredients, click here. We'll also be bringing more little GMO-free shopping booklets to the SJI Co Op soon.

To find the list of national & local businesses who have pledged to avoid GMO beet sugar, & to sign up, go here.

Becky's also turned us on to a wonderful local SJI Facebook page she is a member of & we've joined, Gogo Green, for local info & all things eco, including a discussion page.

Thanks, Becky, and thanks for the use of your great Farmers Market photos!

Palace Theater manager Aaron King made a local viewing of "Food, Inc." on the big screen possible last month. He's also sent us a note about a "CSI: Miami" television show episode that recently aired, titled "Bad Seed"(places to watch it here). The plot's all about food safety, veggie laws, and then it's some kind of crime solving thriller - that's kind of amazing. Who woulda thunk it? Thanks, Aaron!
Speaking of the Palace - Troy Roush, a farmer who spoke so movingly in the movie "Food, Inc" (which is now available on video at Big Store) was kind enough to write back to a question we sent to the ACGA (American Corn Grower's Association) about movie popcorn and genetic modification. (The ACGA is a great organization, you can join - they could use your support). Troy wrote us back a very nice note, saying "I was in the popcorn business for a number of years and at the time I stopped growing (two years ago) there was no GM popcorn being grown and the talk was there wouldn't because popcorn is used for direct human consumption and widely exported to countries (Europe mostly) that would not accept GMO popcorn." Troy said that popcorn has a gene that makes cross-pollination with field corn impossible - it can't be contaminated by field corn. and now this gene has been patented by seed co. Hogemeyer, so, as Troy says, " there is no way around eating popcorn that is not "patented", even though it is not GMO and the Indians showed us how to grow the stuff in the first place."

On a related subject - if you use soy products (movie popcorn 'butter' is one) and you don't want to eat or use genetically modified soy products, call & write the companies you buy from, and tell them.
91 percent of all soy grown in the world is now genetically modified. (Maybe you noticed the word organic disappearing off the soy milk and tofu you see at the market). The genetic modification to soy is the addition of a pesticide (Bt) right into the plant, and a gene making the soy resistant to heavier doses of glyphosate herbicide. Yum yum.
(There are also some troubling things happening around the growing of soy in some of the major producing counties. For example, Paraguay.)

Not too good for the earth or us. Let's do something about that.

"FOOD SAFETY ENHANCEMENT ACT" SENATE BILL 510 and House Bill 2749 (updated 12/3)

Please go to the FTCLDF web site to read about Senate Bill 510, the “Food Safety Enhancement Act”.
One bill has already made it through the House as SB 2749. It includes the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), in which each animal you own (except dogs & cats) must be chipped (with Cargill chips, at your expense), and your premises registered with the government, in addition to requiring paperwork to be filed with the government every time your animal leaves or returns to your premises. Non-compliance results in hefty fines. Veterinarians will be fined for not reporting any un-chipped animals to the government.
Large factory farms (CAFOs-Containment Animal Feeding Operations) are exempted from chipping each animal, but only are required to chip one animal in their massive herds, which defeats the stated purpose of the regulations.

This part of the bill 2749 alone is loaded with problems and doesn't even address the most frequent sources of food contamination in

the US - the CAFOs - but instead buries local family farms in inappropriate regulations and paperwork under the guise of “food safety”.
This bill would effectively drive many, many, very good and very needed, family farms out of business with enormous demands on manpower and resources that amount to nothing but extremely expensive busywork. The original wording of much of the bill actually came directly from Monsanto and Cargill sponsored organizations, taken from ‘voluntary regulations' already enacted by a number of states without having to pass through legislation.

The NAIS is only one of the major problems with these bills.

The bills create incentives for retailers to import food from other countries while not actually being able to hold foreign food facilities to the same standards as US facilities, allowing less-safe food to be brought the US, while undercutting American farmers. However, corporate farms - multinationals - would benefit from this provision, as they own large operations in other countries, paying far below US farm wages (which are already low) and using cheaper and
far less safe growing methods.And that's not the only problem.
In these bills, a practical distinction between CAFOs (factory farms) and small farms raising pastured animals is not made. Protection from contamination of crops such as spinach, by fertilizer and runoff from CAFOs, is not included (read about that here).
The importance of crop and animal biodiversity - the check against devastation by disease developed by nature over billions of years, versus the mono cropping practiced and encouraged over the last 50 years by corporate farm interests - is not addressed. Access to information and research on the safety of GMO crops is not protected, and tight regulation of corporate owned GMO based sterilizing seeds - Terminator seeds (GURTS), which can sterilize fields of contaminated food crops, making seed unusable - is not addressed, nor is the current ownership of most of the world's seed supplies by one bio-tech/chemical corporation.

Much heavier use of herbicides on fields of genetically modified herbicide resistant crops (such as Roundup-Ready) have led to damage to pollinators including Monarch butterflies and bees, and increased toxic runoff to water supplies and contamination of soils. This damaging practice is also not addressed.

If you do like buying from local family farms, and like having them there for you, please help by contacting your state senator NOW.
Senate Bill 510 will be pushed through quickly, as was HB2749, and the damage it will leave family farms open to is serious and largely irreparable.
Similar flawed bills (update - "Processed Food Safety Act" introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein D. CA 12 '09) will soon be quietly finding their way through Congress.

Ask your local independant family farmer. And local farmers in Illinois. Texas. New Jersey. Wisconsin. California. Minnesota. Arkansas. Tennessee. ...This bill is a gift to Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Smithfield Farms, and Tyson. Unfortunately, those companies, while employing American workers (at very low wages) at their factory farms and pesticide, herbicide, and GMO factories, also employ undocumented workers here, and use workers at substandard wages in non US locations. These companies most often take their profits out of the community, and often out of the country, while enjoying US government tax breaks and large subsidies paid for by US taxpayers.

Local small family farms who are an integral, and once again rapidly growing, part of building very strong local economies in spite of all the roadblocks being thrown in their way, provide safe healthy food and jobs to local communities - and have actually been targeted to be crippled by a blizzard of paperwork and enormous unnecessary expenses.
These bills as currently written will do just that.

The benefit will be to the short-term bottom line of these few influential multinational corporations. No benefit will come to local communities when all is balanced out, and very little if any actual 'food safety' will have been achieved.

These bills were designed to be read quickly and to be passed by non-farmers; designed to sound good, while dealing a death-blow to the growing competition safe, healthy, local food is beginning to be to giant corporate factory farms' bottom line, and impairing actual food safety. Those corporate profits don't come back to the American taxpayer in any meaningful way. However, the environmental damage, health problems caused by factory food practices - in addition to unsafe working conditions and poverty-level wages that are products of factory type farms - cost the American taxpayer, especially the working class taxpayer, a lot.

As usual.

Please contact your state's Senators about Senate Bill 510. Please ask that it effectively address the food safety issues posed by CAFOs, mono cropping/biodiversity, and targeting of family farms by competing corporations.

Link - Contact info for Sen. Patty Murray D-WA.
Link - Contact info for Sen. Maria Cantwell D-WA.
Link - Contact info for other states, districts and territories.
(A phone call's better than an email, and a letter is even better. Why not try all 3?)

The Chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee through which the bill passed Wed. is Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) (202)-224-0767, fax (202)-224-5128.
HELP Committee ranking member is Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), (202)-224-6770

Write or Call Your State Congressman about House Bill 2749 (which includes the NAIS).
WA State Districts here; SJI Rep. is Rick Larsen.
This bill has already passed the House, but your Congressman needs to know a bit more about it.
Read more on Food Safety enhancement Act here, and go to links at right here and on the main Land & Sea page for more info on the bills HR2749 and S510 and NAISWho says you can't grow peppers in the Pacific Northwest? Photos of local produce and farmers at market, above, courtesy of San Juan islander Becky Bolt.

YOUR VOICE IS NEEDED: NOW

Photo, top : Becky Bolt. San Juan Island Farmers Market

From the "Small Farmers. Big Change." web page of Equal Exchange comes this important message, below. It's important that our voices are heard NOW:

"The Revolving Door between Big Ag and OUR government

October 29, 2009 by Phyllis Robinson

A broad coalition of groups around the country (Pesticide Action Network, National Family Farm Coalition, Food & Water Watch, Farmworker’s Association of Florida, Institute of Agriculture & Trade Policy, Food Democracy Now!, Greenpeace, Center for Food Safety) have mobilized to block the appointment of Islam Siddiqui to the critical post of U.S. Chief Agricultural Negotiator.

Equal Exchange is encouraging our friends and allies to read the following statement and petition and sign on. We share in the belief that President Obama should be held to his promise to put people’s interests ahead of the special interests of big agriculture.
Dear Colleagues:
Despite campaign promises to the contrary, President Obama has nominated to two key posts “Big Ag” industry insiders who come straight from the chemical pesticide and ag biotechnology sectors.

• Islam Siddiqui — current VP of science and regulatory affairs at CropLife (THE lobbying association for the pesticide/GMO industry). A former registered lobbyist, Siddiqui has been nominated to the critical post of U.S. Chief Agricultural Negotiator. This position will enable him to keep pushing chemical pesticides, inappropriate biotechnologies, and unfair trade arrangements on nations that do not want and can least afford them.
• Roger Beachy — long-time head of Monsanto’s defacto nonprofit research arm — has been installed as director of the USDA’s newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). This office comes with a $500 million budget, and therein control over the U.S. ag research agenda for years to come.

Please join us in signing this petition, urging President Obama to withdraw his Big Ag industry insiders nominations to vital agriculture posts.
We need 50,000 signatures to make an impact and we have until Nov. 4th (when the Senate Finance Committee will vote) to make a difference.
Click here to sign the petition".
Thanks, Small Farmers and Equal Exchange!
Please go here to read more important information from Equal Exchange's "Small Farmers. Big Change." web page, here for info from Organic Consumers Association, and here for the petition from Food Democracy Now. And, please, tell your friends.

USDA Says Biotech Is Compatible with Organic - What You Can Do

Please read this story from the Organic Consumers Association. Especially important is reading the sidebar on the story which explains where the push on GMO's (genetically modified organisms) is coming from.

Although it's often difficult, it's really important to stay updated, and to make your voice heard - as you can see after reading this Organic Consumers Association story, it does make a difference!

Image from Cooperative Grocer
A lot is happening in our government regarding food and water regulations including fisheries - but that's not all - while we are busy with summer. We will be posting about bills such as H.R. 2749 which just passed the House and is to go on to the Senate soon. A great blog from a CSA farmer in Texas - Home Sweet Farm - with some great links on the new Food Safety Enhancement Act (HR 2749 text). Please read the links about this bill - it's being pushed through quietly and quickly - and without important changes, could be devastating for small sustainable farmers.
Contacting your legislators can be crucial, you do have the power to make a difference!

What's happening to the Frasier sockeye is an example of what happens when we don't have a chance to pay attention. Click here for an action you can take to help the wild sockeye survive.

----- Hi Graduates - Looking for something more than a career?
The Practical Training/Farm and Garden Apprenticeship program is taking app's for 2009-2010 (until 10/1/09 for U.S. and Canadian students 9/1/09 for international students).
We wrote about this on our April Actions post, but it bears repeating:
Today, more than 1,200 apprentices have been trained in the organic fields, orchards and greenhouses at UC Santa Cruz, learning not only how to raise food and flowers, but how to make the food system itself more sustainable by addressing issues of social justice. They are today's organic farmers, market gardeners, urban agriculturalists, school garden teachers, and others working to promote local, healthy food in communities around the country.
Contact the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, UC Santa Cruz, 831-459-2321 email: apprenticeship@ucsc.edu

Recent graduates exemplify the program’s potential to create new farmers…

Kelsey Keener, Ryan Power, and Noah Bresler raise vegetables, fruit, and heritage livestock on historic Williams Island near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Mike Nolan and Gabe Eggers coax crops from the sagebrush country of southern Colorado for local markets. Amy Rice-Jones manages the brand new Bounty Farm, where she coordinates a team of volunteers growing food for low-income residents of Petaluma, California.

Read more of the profiles of UC Santa Cruz apprentices here.

Photo above, left: The Farm to College Project at UC Santa Cruz - The Farm-to-College project at UC Santa Cruz links the Center’s Farm on the UCSC campus with other local organic farms and with UCSC campus organizations to bring organic produce to the campus dining halls and restaurants, while bringing students to the Farm for sustainable food systems education.

Supporting the "Grow a Farmer Campaign" an independent project that helps financially support the housing needs of the CAFS program, or taking part in this program are 2 ways to help. Click here for homepage of the CASFS program.

Check out the web page and YouTube video for the "Grow A Farmer Campaign".

AND...We can also learn from this program, and work to develop a training program for farmers right here. We're starting, with our L & S Youth Club Farm Garden and farmworker training; we know others on the island are thinking the same thing, and doing it, too.

NEW PAGE ! - MORE INFO

Photo, left, from Credo
Welcome to the first post of our Actions Page - This is where we will list news from out of our region that affects us all, and actions you can take right now to help!
We will be building this page in the next few weeks and will begin adding more stories and links to keep you informed.

From Credo Action Network:

Tell the Pesticide Peddlers: We support Michelle Obama's organic garden.

The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA)represents chemical companies that produce pesticides, and they are angry that - wait for it - Michelle Obama isn't using chemicals in her organic garden at the White House. In an email to their supporters, a MACA spokesman wrote, "While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made [us] shudder.", and went on to publish a letter it had sent to the First Lady asking her to consider using chemicals -- or what they call "crop protection products" -- in her garden.
Sign this petition today to tell the board members of MACA (virtually all of them big chemical executives) that we don't appreciate their telling Michelle Obama (or any of us) to use pesticides in our gardens.

From Organic Consumer's Association:
Contact Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius and urge her to veto HB 2121 before April 16^th.
HB 2121 could potentiall restrict any national US dairy from properly labeling their milk products as free from genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rbGH or rbST).
rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) is a genetically engineered variant of the natural growth hormone produced by cows. Formerly manufactured by Monsanto, it is sold to dairy farmers under the trade name Posilac. Injection of this hormone forces cows to boost milk production by about 10%, while increasing the incidences of mastitis, lameness, and reproductive complications.

Save Organic Standards: Tell the USDA and the NOSB to Protect Organic Standards. Under the new Obama Administration, with Kathleen Merrigan as second-in-command at the USDA, we have an opportunity to prevent corporate greed from corrupting organic standards.

Action Alert: Critical Pending Food Safety Legislation - H.R. 875
Please Ask Congress to Protect High Quality Organic and Local Food

(Several other bills include provisions that should worry small farmers – like H.R. 814, which calls for a mandatory animal identification system, or H.R. 759, which is more likely to move through Congress than H.R. 875 and calls for electronic recordkeeping on farms and registration fees for processing plants. For factory farms this is a very good idea; for small sustainable farms, it can be not only unnecessary - overkill - but devastating in cost of money and time).
People should know what they're talking about when they call or write their government representatives. Organic sustainable farmers will tell you that passing a bill (HR 875) with so many ambiguities and the 'one size fits all' potential will not be good at all for the future of organic farmers, given the presence of Big Chem and Big Ag in the Congress, Dept. of Ag, FDA, and Farm Bureau. It's important that people find out who their officials and decision makers in these agencies are, who they worked for, who they will likely work for again.

The term "food safety" has more than one meaning: There is the idea of tainted or diseased food supplies. There is also the idea of destruction of biodiversity, contamination and sterilization of seed stocks with bioengineered seed crossbreeding, and loss of small communities' ability to feed themselves. Small sustainable farms can be lost due to inappropriate and overwhelming regulation, and seed and animal manipulation and patents. The call to contact your representative is really a call for education about what is happening to our food supply. Who owns our food supply (and our water) and are we allowed to feed ourselves and to understand what food safety really is?
Books and other media to help understand more about this incredibly important issue:

• Read Vandana Shiva's "Stolen Harvest; The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply".
• Watch the excellent video "The Future of Food".
• Read Jane Goodall's "Harvest for Hope".
• Read about the NAIS (National Animal Identification System).
• Watch the incredibly informative "The World According to Monsanto"
• Watch the award wining documentary Flow about water issues

All of these can help in understanding the significance of the term "food safety".

Would corporations actually do things that are not in the best interest of the American people? Is that really a question right now? If, incredibly, somehow it is, the book & documentary "The Corporation" is helpful in understanding the structure and need for short-term profit of the the modern-day corporations controlling so much of the present and potential food supply and holding so much influence in a number of governments.

WANT TO HEAR SOME HAPPY NEWS? WANT TO BE A PART OF IT?
left: The Farm to College Project at UC Santa Cruz
Check out the web page and YouTube video for the Grow A Farmer Campaign.
It will make you happy!
Today, more than 1,200 apprentices have been trained in the organic fields, orchards and greenhouses at UC Santa Cruz, learning not only how to raise food and flowers, but how to make the food system itself more sustainable by addressing issues of social justice. They are today's organic farmers, market gardeners, urban agriculturalists, school garden teachers, and others working to promote local, healthy food in communities around the country.

Recent graduates exemplify the program’s potential to create new farmers…

Kelsey Keener, Ryan Power, and Noah Bresler raise vegetables, fruit, and heritage livestock on historic Williams Island near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Mike Nolan and Gabe Eggers coax crops from the sagebrush country of southern Colorado for local markets. Amy Rice-Jones manages the brand new Bounty Farm, where she coordinates a team of volunteers growing food for low-income residents of Petaluma, California.

Read more of the profiles of UC Santa Cruz apprentices here.

Supporting or taking part in this program is one way to help.

AND...We can also learn from this program, and work to develop a training program for farmers right here. We're starting, with our L & S Youth Club Farm Garden and farmworker training; we know others on the island are thinking the same thing, and doing it, too.

MORE GOOD NEWS:

Take a look at this month's issue of Yes! magazine - it is incredible!
You will be inspired - the article titled "Growing Power" will remind you that it only takes one person to begin to make change - you do have it in you! Read all about Will Allen, The New Crop of Farmers, Percy Schmeiser, and the Good Food Revolution. You will come away with a smile on your face!

Left: Will Allen shows some of the 10,000 fish growing in one of Growing Power's four-foot-deep, 10,000-gallon aquaponics tanks. Waste from the fish feeds greens and tomatoes. The plants purify the water for the fish. The fish eventually go to market. Photo by Ryan Griffis temporarytraveloffice.net

Yes! is also available at the Marketplace, or you can go to these links above and read online.