"For gardeners sad to see the summer drawing to a close, there's some comfort to be drawn from the fall planting season for perennials, trees and shrubs, which is just around the corner. What's more, there's the novelty of this year's updated Plant Hardiness Zone Map, released early this year."
A debate in Iowa last week between presidential candidates' surrogates feature the Romney camp alleging environmental regulations would hurt farmers, while Obama's team emphasized the help his administration had offered to suffering farmers.
"Speaking on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) yesterday blasted the Obama administration for environmental regulations he said were stifling farmers and ranchers.
After a study by Stanford researchers, published September 4, concluded that organic foods had negligible health benefits, controversy occurred. Now critics, mostly from the environmental health and organic food communities, are challenging the study's methods, its accuracy and completeness, its framing questions, potential conflict of interest stemming from funding support, and the competence of the news media in reporting it.
"Searing droughts in the United States and Russia will deplete harvests of wheat, corn and soybeans, the U.S. government said on Wednesday, but global food supplies were not hurt as badly as many had feared."
"A U.S. farmer group on Tuesday dropped its opposition to efforts by Dow AgroSciences to roll out a new biotech crop system in exchange for some concessions by Dow, including help investigating any accidental crop damage."
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had planned to display a video showing animals being slaughtered and instances of abuse. The fair board said that PETA could only show the video within its booth and out of public view, so that people would have to make a deliberate decision to see it.
A new report by Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times points out that basic data about the routine use of antibiotics in farm animals (which consume some 80 percent of the nation's antibiotics) is largely missing and that a ferocious germ resistant to many types of antibiotics had increased tenfold on chicken breasts.
"The province of Quebec is responsible for 75 percent of the maple syrup produced in the ENTIRE WORLD. So it’s no surprise that they keep a strategic maple syrup reserve -- hot weather ruins the volume and taste of the syrup crop, and pancake fiends can get ugly, so it pays to have backup. Which is all very good planning, until more than a quarter of the syrup nest egg disappears."
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