Good Food from Healthy Farms
Industry News
Humpty Dumpty
Aug 19th
On one end of the spectrum, you have flocks of two to three hens, kept in your or your neighbor’s backyard, where the one dozen eggs produced each week is enough to feed the family that cares for the chickens.
On the other end of the spectrum is an egg factory in the middle of Iowa, where millions of birds lay millions of eggs per day (32 million egg cartons recalled times 12 eggs per carton divided by 90 days of production equals 4,266,666 eggs per day where the average hen lays one egg per day).
It’s hard to imagine how far and how fast we got away from decentralized and local production of food. The recent recall by Wright County Egg has now reached 17 states (including Washington) and the number of reported cases of salmonella linked to the eggs is over 2,000.
Nationally, only 0.4% of all food purchased by consumers comes direct from the farmer. We’re working with you to grow this number, and as our distribution network grows so does our ability to keep local farmland in production, plant heirloom seeds and raise heritage breeds of animals, keep dollars in our community, and, not least of all, deliver incredibly fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables.
If you are free on Sunday, please take a drive out to Tahoma Farms, at 21108 Orville Rd E, Orting. We will be there from 2 to 6 pm. There will be guided farm tours at 2:30 and 3:30, and a potluck dinner at 5:00. We hope you can join us!
Greenwashing & Other Fine Tales
Aug 6th
We have the first in a new series of podcasts posted on our blog for those interested in hearing an impromptu conversation about McDonalds, Wal-Mart, sustainability and how local food production, and Terra Organics, fits into the mix.
There’s also a graphic that I’ve been holding onto for a while, and it now seems timely to share it.
The subsidy regime pits commodity growers against vegetable and fruit growers, and McDonalds and others buy fillers and subsidized meat, dairy, and grains at an artificially low cost. The foods that should be accessible to the least healthy amongst us have little to no price supports. So long as corn syrup and factory meat and dairy dominate the $60 billion a year farm program in this country, McDonalds will always dominate the way food is produced and consumed in this country, no matter how many new farmers markets are springing up around the country.
But, of course, that doesn’t mean we can give up the fight.
Who Owns Organic?
Mar 29th
Unbeknown to many a healthy eater, from 1995 to 2007 a lot of the bright organic brands of tomorrow became subsidiaries of the “big name” brands of yesterday. Thanks to Philip H. Howard, we now have that in a visual form.
In 1995 the organic processing industry was relatively ‘fragmented’, as indicated by the 81 independent organic brands shown at the beginning of the animation. By 2007, however, all but 15 of these were acquired by multinational food processors, many of which also introduced organic versions of their mainstream brands. Note the extent to which investment firms played a role in this process of consolidation by acquiring one or more organic brands before selling them to multinational processors.
View video here.
