A dairy industry group with strong ties to Wisconsin has added more examples to its list of what the group says is “fear-based” food labeling. [node:read-more:link]
Tens of thousands of wilting South Floridians stood hours in the sweltering, soggy heat Sunday at Tropical Park, waiting to apply for special food stamps available only to victims Hurricane Irma, stunning state officials who were expecting just a fraction of that response. “We’ve been dealing with about 10,000 people a day,” said Ofelia Martinez, the Miami site manager for the state Department of Children and Families (DCF). “But when we opened the doors this morning, the police told us there were already 50,000 people waiting outside.” [node:read-more:link]
The Illinois Commerce Commission has launched an 18-month study to explore the use of emerging technologies to improve the state's electric grid. The "NextGrid: Illinois' Utility of the Future" study is the collaborative effort of the ICC, Ameren Illinois, ComEd, and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois, the Herald-Whig reported.It's a "consumer-focused collaborative study to transform Illinois' energy landscape and economy," said ICC Chairman Brien J. Sheahan. [node:read-more:link]
Wind energy is expected to overtake coal in Texas after Friday's news that two large coal-fired power plants are set to close in the next year. The utility firm Luminant announced that it would close the Sandow Power Plant and the Big Brown Power Plant in early 2018. [node:read-more:link]
Across the rural-urban divide the average five-year survival rate across all birth year cohorts for urban (metro) counties was less than for rural (non-metro) counties, 67% and 70%, respectively. This is consistent with the findings of others (Buss and Lin, 1990; Renski, 2009; Yu, Orazem, and Jolly, 2011). If the definitions of rural and urban are refined along a broader spectrum from large urban to remote sparsely populated rural, the relatively high survival rates in rural areas becomes even more pronounced (Figure 2). [node:read-more:link]
For at least the third time this year, the crowd-sourced website iwaspoisoned.com has identified a foodborne illness outbreak, this time among students who ate at a Georgia Tech dining hall. The “North Avenue Dining Hall” at the university in Atlanta started showing up in reports on the foodborne illness website in the past couple of days. When such clusters of reports at one foodservice location pop up, Patrick Quade keeps a close eye on the website he launched in 2009. [node:read-more:link]
The Trump administration has reached a deal with three major agribusiness companies for new voluntary labeling requirements for a controversial herbicide blamed for damaging crops. The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday its agreement with Monsanto, BASF and DuPont regarding the application of dicamba, which is used to control weeds in fields of genetically modified cotton and soybeans. [node:read-more:link]
Immigration as a top line issue for dairy farmers would have been unthinkable just a generation ago when Wisconsin’s agricultural landscape was dominated by small and medium-sized dairy farms run by the families that owned them.Now, the nation’s No. 2 milk producing state is home to a growing number of large concentrated animal feeding operations. [node:read-more:link]
The operators of three agriculture businesses have been told to pay more than $30,000 for three large fish kills that Ohio's natural resources department says were caused by livestock manure spread on fields. Investigators think ammonia-laden manure put onto the fields in northwestern Ohioahead of rainstorms in August washed into creeks and caused the fish kills.An Ohio law put in place to combat algae in Lake Erie prohibits farmers from putting manure on fields before heavy rains because the manure also contains phosphorous that feeds algae. [node:read-more:link]
Syngenta’s CEO is calling for “honest and open” discussions between NGOs and the industry, instead of debates that were politicized and unscientific. Syngenta CEO Eryk Fyrwald thinks there should be a wide-scale debate on what constitutes “sustainable agriculture” in face of a number of current controversies over pesticides.“We have a lot of discussions about specific products. [node:read-more:link]
