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A food agenda for Obama
Christopher D. Cook, Christian Science Monitor
Now's the time to reinvent America's farm and food policies.
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Within hours of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack's nomination last week as Agriculture secretary, websites were humming with well-documented critiques of his affinity for genetically engineered crops, agribusiness giant Monsanto, heavily polluting factory farms, and other Big Farm interests.

Some critics expressed outrage, others surprise, especially since they had mounted a vigorous, 55,000-plus strong online petition to persuade President-elect Barack Obama to nominate someone more progressive who would promote sustainable food and farming.

The need for sweeping change could not be clearer when it comes to our food: At taxpayer expense, current policy subsidizes large corporate farms and destructive industrial agriculture, which rob the countryside of economic diversity and precious environmental resources, such as water and topsoil.

These same subsidies, and anemic regulatory enforcement, encourage an increasingly monopolized food system, and a "cheap food" policy that lards us with fatty, processed foods – the cost of which is ultimately dear, more than $100 billion annually for obesity and diet-related diseases. Today's food system also generates a sizable portion of America's greenhouse gases, and rests on fast-dwindling and volatile oil supplies.

... Here, then, is a not-so-modest nine-point platform for food reform, some of which could be included in Obama's stimulus package.
(26 December 2008)
Related from Leader-Telegram (Wisconsin): Farmers, state pin hopes on ag secretary.

It was a gas (Haber-Bosch process for fertilizers)
Araminta Wordsworth, Financial Post (Canada)
The Alechemy of Air
Thomas Hagaer
Harmony Books
315 pages, $27.95

It seemed as if the prophecies of Thomas Malthus, the doomsayer of overpopulation, were coming true. A century ago, the world faced a crisis just as severe as the energy/ global warming conundrum that confronts us today: Pundits predicted millions of people would starve as farmers' yields dropped because of a shortage of natural fertilizers, such as manure, guano and Chilean nitrates.

The news set off the equivalent of a nuclear arms race -- the search for a chemical process that could extract nitrogen from the air and transform it into fertilizer. Essentially, atmospheric nitrogen had to be persuaded to combine with hydrogen gas to form ammonia.

The winners were German. In 1913, the BASF plant in Oppau, near Ludwigshafen, produced the first ammonia-based fertilizer. A year later it was turning out commercial quantities and today, fertilizer made by the Haber-Bosch process -- named for its inventors, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch -- keeps crops growing worldwide.

It is hard to overemphasize the importance of their discovery, writes Thomas Hager, a veteran science and medical reporter.
(27 December 2008)

Fresh eggs, finances and fun: families flock to keep hens
Kirsty Scott, Guardian
... Urban henkeeping has become increasingly popular in recent years, but breeders and suppliers are reporting an "astonishing" rise in the number of UK households buying hens in the last 12 months or so, fuelled in part, they believe, by the economic downturn and growing pressure on family budgets.
(24 December 2008)