A New York Times article out today highlights a 3-decade nutrition study comparing grass-fed beef to grain-fed beef.
From the article:
Beef from grass-fed animals has lower levels of unhealthy fats and higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, which are better for cardiovascular health. Grass-fed beef also has lower levels of dietary cholesterol and offers [...]

The American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman gave the keynote address at a Farm Bureau conference in Seattle earlier this week. The text of his speech is here.
Wow. Talk about being divisive. It seems to me that the FB Prez just issued a call to arms (literally?) for Farm Bureau members. [...]

Thanks to Karen for tipping me off about an article about the link between drug-resistant bacteria and animals fed antibiotics. Article here.
The article talks about how the rise of (unnecessary) antibiotics use in animals is leading to drug-resistant infections. For readers who aren’t already aware of this, most of the cows, pigs, and [...]

I found an article from a couple weeks back in the Oregonian about efforts by farmers’ markets to encourage low-income shoppers. I thought it was an interesting article which highlighted the fact that while use of food stamps is up dramatically at several area markets, some markets are having a tough time getting low [...]

I was invited to speak at the InFARMation (and Beer!) gathering next Tuesday evening. Friends of Family Farmers has been hosting these events since the start of the year.
I’ll be talking about our nearly 10 years of experience raising animals, options for consumers who choose to opt out of purchasing factory-farmed meat, [...]

Mother Jones has an interesting article about farmers markets in its March/April edition. The article’s thesis is that farmers markets may not be all they are cracked up to be, and that the food that customers are buying at farmers markets may be overpriced versions of exactly the same produce (even grown by the [...]

The US Dept of Health and Human Services recently conducted a study on food source traceability (thanks to the Oregon Independent blog for the tip-off about this study), and found that they could only trace 12.5% of the items. Wow. To turn that figure around, they couldn’t identify the source of 87.5% [...]

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry held a hearing on NAIS, the National Animal Identification System a few days ago. I was alerted to this by Shannon Hayes of Grass-fed Cooking.
It appears that the Omnibus Appropriations bill includes funding for NAIS, which is a program that if mandated, will have terrible [...]

The view this morning…

It’s now sunny and beautiful – I’ll try to post another photo later today. I think our biggest worry now is the fact that with 12 inches of snow on the ground, the wire keeping the steers in is much closer to the ground than before. Hopefully some of the [...]