Free Republic

One of the world's largest food companies says it's about to take a big bite out of global warming. General Mills, maker of Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Wheaties, said Monday that it will set a target to limit air pollution throughout its entire supply chain next summer. This marks the first time the food giant has pledged to measurably rein in greenhouse-gas emissions from its agricultural suppliers of ingredients like soy and sugarcane. Environmental watchdogs say the effort is significant. According to Oxfam, air pollution created by the agricultural industry makes up a quarter of total greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide....

Things are heating up on planet Earth. Average global temperatures shattered records this June ... for the second month in a row, according to a new report from the National Climactic Data Center. The NCDC, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, analyzed data from 2,000 weather stations scattered across the globe measuring both ocean and land temperatures and found that global average temperatures surpassed the previous record by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit. That makes June 2014 the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880. If this trend continues, 2014 could top 2010 as the warmest year recorded.

USA Today. No excerpts. Just title and link. http://www.kare11.com/story/entertainment/music/2014/07/22/george-harrison-memorial-tree-killed-by-beetles/12985001/

A Saudi farmer seeking revenge for the loss of his sheep chased two wolves for most of the day and killed them before hanging their bodies on a sign board in the area. Qayed Al Mutairi said he was determined to kill the two wolves after they devoured 18 of his sheep over the past few weeks. He told Sabq daily that he chased the two predators to the mountains by his four-wheel vehicle most of the day and shot them. “Mutairi then hanged the two animals at a signboard so other farmers and people will see them. This is...

Cities throughout California will have to impose mandatory restrictions on outdoor watering under an emergency state rule approved Tuesday. Saying that it was time to increase conservation in the midst of one of the worst droughts in decades, the State Water Resources Control Board adopted drought regulations that give local agencies the authority to fine those who waste water up to $500 a day. Many Southern California cities, including Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Long Beach, already have mandatory restrictions in place. But most communities across the state are still relying on voluntary conservation, and Californians in general have fallen...

New research confirms some of the basic tenets of the Wheat Belly, a book by Dr. William Davis, which argues that wheat avoidance results in healthy weight loss.Published in Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry this month, and titled “Gluten-free diet reduces adiposity, inflammation and insulin resistance associated with the induction of PPAR-alpha and PPAR-gamma expression,” researchers compared the effects of a gluten-based diet to a gluten-free diet in mice.Researchers Noted Gluten exclusion (protein complex present in many cereals) has been proposed as an option for the prevention of diseases other than coeliac disease. However, the effects of gluten-free diets on obesity...

In the nation’s agricultural heartland, farming is more than a multibillion-dollar industry that feeds the world. It could be on track to become a right, written into law alongside the freedom of speech and religion. Some powerful agriculture interests want to declare farming a right at the state level as part of a wider campaign to fortify the ag industry against crusades by animal-welfare activists and opponents of genetically modified crops. The emerging battle could have lasting repercussions for the nation’s food supply and for the millions of people worldwide who depend on U.S. agricultural exports. It’s also possible that...

Representatives of the international coalition No Patents on Seeds! from France, Germany and Spain have filed an opposition against a European patent held by Monsanto on conventionally bred tomatoes (EP1812575). The patent claims tomatoes with a natural resistance to a fungal disease called botrytis. The original tomatoes used for this patent came from the international gene bank in Gatersleben, Germany. It was already known that these plants had the desired resistance and they were simply crossed with other tomato plants. Monsanto then produced a cleverly worded patent in order to create the impression that genetic engineering had been used to...

BERTIE COUNTY, N.C. — Around 28,000 chickens were killed Tuesday morning after a North Carolina farm caught fire. Officials said it happened in one of the six chicken houses on Tom Moore Farms in Bertie County. Fire officials said strong winds spread the fire quickly and the house was already destroyed when emergency responders arrived. The owner said the chickens were almost a month old. There is no word on what started the fire. The investigation is ongoing.

A preservative used to cure bacon is being tested as poison for the nation's estimated 5 million feral hogs. Descendants of both escaped domestic pigs and imported Eurasian boars, the swine cost the U.S. about $1.5 billion a year -- including $800 million in damage to farms nationwide.

The White House is finally addressing a serious, and misunderstood, problem with a new “bee plan.” The bee plan is a federal strategy to stop the sharp decline of pollinators, most notably bees, and restore pollinator populations to their previous buzzing glory. Can the White House end a problem that has alluded scientists and policy makers for over a decade? The bee plan is focused on habitats… and bureaucracy. The first step of the plan is form a task force. The group will include representatives from 14 major federal departments (click here for the full list).

A strange catastrophe struck Spain's pig farmers in the spring of 2010. On 41 farms across the country—each home to between 800 and 3,000 pigs—many sows suddenly ceased bearing young. On some farms, all the sows stopped reproducing. On others, those that did become pregnant produced smaller litters. When investigators examined the sows and the semen that had been used to artificially inseminate them—it had been collected from different boar studs and refrigerated—they couldn't find anything wrong. The sperm cells weren't misshapen. None of the sows were diseased. No microbes or fungal toxins were detected in their feed or water....

A German farmer has revealed shocking GMO company tactics to silence him in an exclusive interview with RT Op-Edge. German dairy farmer, Gottfried Glöckner, has told William Engdahl about attempted blackmail, character assassination and, ultimately, wrongful imprisonment he suffered when he refused to back off his charges that the Anglo-Swiss GMO company, Syngenta, had provided him with highly toxic GMO Maize seeds that ruined his prize dairy herd and his land. After spending two years in prison, Glöckner is traveling round the world to tell the story and warn the public of the extreme danger of GMO seeds....

Here's a cool homemade country western song I received in an email.....Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

If you think that the world's greatest inventions came from the fevered minds of solitary geniuses, think again. As you scan this list of the 10 inventions that changed the world, note how many of them perfected workable designs. 10. Plow Compared to some of the gleaming, electronic inventions that fill our lives today, the plow doesn't seem very exciting. It's a simple cutting tool used to carve a furrow into the soil, churning it up to expose nutrients and prepare it for planting. Yet the plow is probably the one invention that made all others possible. No one knows...

The leftover beef trimmings derisively known as 'pink slime' is making a comeback two years after a series of graphic news broadcasts devastated sales. Two of the largest makers of the ground beef product are reporting a rebound in customers thanks in part to rising prices of its higher-quality counterparts. Average ground beef prices have jumped 10 per cent this year to an all-time high of $3.808 per pound in April, according to the Bureau of Labor. Cargill Inc's sales of finely textured beef have tripled since March 2012, and the agriculture company now has about 400 customers for the...

It's a tale of two dogs. One, a puggle lounges peacefully on his owner’s lap. The other, a border collie, bounds freely across a grassy knoll. Although the love between man and dog is indeed powerful, you might wonder whether the active, outdoors pup is enjoying a more enriching existence than his indoors counterpart. By keeping dogs as inside companions, are we asking them to lead less satisfying lives?

The correct way to eat a cockroach, at least in this corner of northern China, is to fry it not once but twice in a wok of smoking hot oil. The cockroach, whose innards resemble cottage cheese, has an earthy taste, with a slight twinge of ammonia. But they have become popular in China not for their taste, but for their medicinal benefits. "They really are a miracle drug," said Liu Yusheng, a professor at the Shandong Agricultural university and the head of Shandong province's Insect Association. "They can cure a number of ailments and they work much faster than...

Sheriff's deputies say a Lakeland man faces domestic battery charges after hitting his brother with marijuana plants from their yard. The fight happened Saturday evening shortly after 31-year-old Rodney Brown and 33-year-old Jackie Brown got into a verbal altercation at the house they share. Rodney Brown was arrested on charges that include domestic battery, cultivation of marijuana and possession of marijuana over 20 grams.

The main cause of the monarch butterfly's decline is the loss of milkweed — its food — in its U.S. breeding grounds, a new study has found. That all but confirms that the spread of genetically modified crops is indirectly killing the monarch.