Mother Jones: HOW FACTORY FARMS PLAY CHICKEN WITH ANTIBIOTICS →

How Factory Farms Play Chicken with Antibiotics, And the inside story of one company confronting its role in creating dangerous superbugs.

BY TOM PHILPOTT; PHOTOGRAPHS BY TRISTAN SPINSKI 

The massive metal double doors open and I'm hit with a whoosh of warm air. Inside the hatchery, enormous racks are stacked floor to ceiling with brown eggs. The racks shake every few seconds, jostling the eggs to simulate the conditions created by a hen hovering atop a nest. I can hear the distant sound of chirping, and Bruce Stewart-Brown, Perdue's vice president for food safety, leads me down a hall to another room. Here, the sound is deafening. Racks are roiling with thousands of adorable yellow chicks looking stunned amid the cracked ruins of their shells. Workers drop the babies into plastic pallets that go onto conveyor belts, where they are inspected for signs of deformity or sickness. The few culls are euthanized, and the birds left in each pallet are plopped on something like a flat colander and gently shaken, forcing their remaining shell debris to fall into a bin below. Now clean and fluffy, the chicks are ready to be stacked into trucks for delivery to nearby farms, where they'll be raised into America's favorite meat.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/05/perdue-antibiotic-free-chicken-meat-resistance

Mother Jones: California Goes Nuts →

It takes a gallon of water to produce one almond. And that's not the most insane fact about the hedge-fund-fueled race to plant thirsty trees in the middle of a catastrophic drought.

ON A SUNBAKED AUGUST MORNING, off a rural road in the heart of California's Central Valley, a low-slung tractor rumbles between neat rows of identical, light-green trees. To its right, a plume of dust billows up, thick enough to blot out the sky above the treetops. A chute on the truck sends a steady stream of almonds flying into the trailer hitched behind.

Sweating as I skitter around to avoid the moving tractor, I'm witnessing what has emerged as one of the Central Valley's most lucrative rituals: the almond harvest. 

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/california-drought-almonds-water-use

Mother Jones: One Weird Trick To Fix Farms Forever →

Does David Brandt hold the secret for turning industrial agriculture from global-warming problem to carbon solution?

CHATTING WITH DAVID BRANDT outside his barn on a sunny June morning, I wonder if he doesn't look too much like a farmer—what a casting director might call "too on the nose." He's a beefy man in bib overalls, a plaid shirt, and well-worn boots, with short, gray-streaked hair peeking out from a trucker hat over a round, unlined face ruddy from the sun.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/09/cover-crops-no-till-david-brandt-farms

Bitter Greens Journal: Better and better every day? →

One of the themes of Bitter Greens Gazette will be to debunk the idea that the industrial food system is crumbling under the weight of a sustainable food movement--that small-scale local ag might, sometime soon, overwhelm or transform Big Food. 

The argument goes like this: Everywhere I go, I have more chances to buy organic. Not only are Whole Foods outlets sprouting like mung beans in suburban strip malls, but my locally dominant massive supermarket chain has a whole section that's organic. Why, just the other day, I was in Sam's Club, and I found some organic milk! And my favorite local "gourmet" restaurant features local vegetables. Our side is winning! 

By indulging in a bitter laugh at such effusions, we'll certainly be accused of pessimism, of not "thinking positive," a self-help platitude that's taken on near-religious status over the past decade or so.

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/2005/01/better-and-better-every-day.html

First blog post: Bitter Greens Journal, Monsanto on the March →

THIS BLOG WILL SERVE AS A RUNNING CRITIQUE OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE, A CLEARINGHOUSE FOR INFO ON SUSTAINABLE FARMING, AND A WORKING MANIFESTO FOR A LIBERATION POLITICS BASED ON FOOD.

Activists have won key victories in the battle against genetically modified food. Several industrial food purveyors--from baby-food giant Gerber to pet-food maker Iams to cereal producer General Mills--have renounced under pressure the use of GMO ingredients. McDonalds and Burger King promised in 2000 not to use GMO potatoes for their French fries (although the beef they use is raised on GMO corn). These and other blows to the growth of GMO have inspired a somewhat celebratory mood in some quarters of the foodie left. Writing in his much-celebrated Coming Home to Eat (2002), local-food guru Gary Paul Nabhan declared 2000 to have been a "watershed in the history of global food politics," marked by broad global protest against GMO and other schemes of industrial agriculture. 

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/2005/01/monsanto-on-march.html