Growers
and Greens Unite | 1 |
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Even if you don't drive a combine or herd cattle, your food
choices affect how land is farmed and how well rural environments
are protected. Here are some agricultural resources worth
harvesting:
MEAT FACTORIES Concentrated animal feeding operations,
which cram thousands of cows, hogs, or chickens in unsanitary
barracks, produce hundreds of billions of pounds of waste each year.
Family farmers around the country have joined with Sierra Club
activists to protect drinking water, lakes, and rivers from these
mammoth facilities. For more information, go to www.sierraclub.org/factoryfarms.
To ease yourself into pig politics, read the musings of Ken Midkiff,
director of the Club's Clean Water Campaign (and a onetime Future
Farmer of America) at www.sierraclub.org/roadtrip/lowplainsdrifter.
HELP FROM THE HILL In February, the Senate passed a
farm appropriations bill that would encourage farmers to safeguard
clean water, preserve wetlands, and prevent suburban sprawl.
Sponsored by Iowa senator Tom Harkin, the legislation would double
funding for conservation programs, a vast improvement over the Farm
Bill passed by the House late last year. For updates, go to www.sierraclub.org/cleanwater/waterquality/farmbill.asp.
PROFILES IN TILLAGE To learn how some family farmers
thrive with fewer chemicals and less harm to the environment, read
The New American Farmer: Profiles of Agricultural Innovation.
Produced by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this book is
available on the Web at www.sare.org/newfarmer.
RAISING AWARENESS For a better understanding of modern
farming, read Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial
Agriculture, published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology and
Island Press, which looks at our ecologically destructive
agricultural system and offers a vision for a safer way to produce
food. Essays by leading ecological thinkers, including Wendell
Berry, Wes Jackson, David Ehrenfeld, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana
Shiva, and Gary Nabhan are accompanied by more than 250 photographs.
After reading it, you'll no longer be able to disconnect the foods
you eat from the industrial system that produces them. For more
information, go to http://www.islandpress.org/. Up
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