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COWS NOT COMING HOME IN TEXAS

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
26. September 2008
Comment

Hurricane Ike was, thankfully, not as devastating to southeast Texas as originally feared. But, as the New York Times' Kate Murphy reports, one consequence is that 25,000 cows were displaced from their homes.

Now the Texas Dept. of Agriculture is teaming with the non-governmental ...

PRIVATIZING FIREFIGHTING

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
18. August 2008
Comment

The New York Times Jesse McKinley reports on how the U.S. Forest Service is contracting out who extinguishes wildfires. The Forest Service, which is under the Dept. of Agriculture, argues that because these fires mostly occur during the summer its only necessary to have firefighters ...

BEEF INCREASINGLY LESS FOR DINNER

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
15. August 2008
Comment

The Associated Press reports that the United States Dept. of Agriculture has recalled 160,000 more pounds of beef produced by Nebraska Beef Ltd. This brings the Nebraska Beef meat recalled to 1.36 million pounds-- all because the company's production practices don't effectively guard against E coli.

The Nebraska Beef has caused ...

CONSERVATIONISTS COULD GET PLOWED

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
11. July 2008
Comment

The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach reports that the United States Dept. of Agriculture is considering whether to plow 1.2 million acres of land previously set aside for conservation. Currently farmers are getting paid not to harvest this land in the ...

BROWN V. FOREST SERVICE

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
04. June 2008
Comment

The Washington Post’s Christopher Lee gives us all the zany details about a four-year battle between the U.S. Forest Service and Rep. Henry Brown (R-S.C.). Brown has paid a $4,700 fine to the Dept. of Agriculture’s Forest Service after a burn from his South Carolina tree farm spread into a ...

CLEARLY, WHITE HOUSE IN BED WITH ENVIROS

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment, Environment
28. May 2008
Comment

Global warming is already causing forest fires, snowpacks and droughts in the U.S. and is affecting hundreds of animal species. So says a report from the Dept. of Agriculture’s U.S. Climate Science Program. The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin quotes Richard Moss, the former ...

DOWNER COWS OUT

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
21. May 2008
Comment

Dept. of Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer told reporters yesterday that downer cattle, which cannot stand up on their own, would be banned from slaughterhouses. The Washington Post’s Christopher Lee reports that the ban comes after a California slaughterhouse was videotaped in January abusing cows and then using prods to make ...

BIAS PERSISTS AT AG DEPT

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
19. May 2008
Comment

A Government Accountability Office report released last week slammed the Dept of Agriculture as still not confronting its decades-long record of discrimination. GAO says the Dept lacks even credible data about the number of bias complaints it has received from both minority farmers and its own federal employees. Class ...

U.S. ‘CULTURAL RESOURCES’ NOT PRESERVED

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
15. May 2008
Comment

The non-profit, non-government National Trust for Historic Preservation will release a report today saying that only a fraction of America’s two million “cultural resources” are being properly maintained. The Dept. of Agriculture’s Forest Service has the job of preserving these cultural sites. They include civil war battlefields and Native American ...

USE OF FEDERAL FOOD STAMPS HITS RECORD LEVEL

Cat.: Dept. of Agriculture, News & Comment
31. March 2008
Comment

The latest consequence of the growing economic morass: 28 million Americans are expected to be on food stamps this year. The news, though, is not all bad. The New York Times's Erick Eckholm reports that states have been successfully promoting the availability of the Department ...