Free Republic

JOHANNESBURG -- South Africa's minister of land reform says black farmers have resold nearly 30 percent of the white farmland bought for them by the government - often back to the previous white owners. Minister Gugile Nkwinti announced the startling indicator of failure at Wednesday's launch of a long-delayed government policy paper to revitalize plans to more equitably distribute agricultural land, redressing historical wrongs. Seventeen years after white minority rule ended, the vast majority of agricultural land remains in the hands of some 40,000 white commercial farmers. Nkwinti said the government had bought 7 percent of the country's commercial farmland...

I was listening to a story on NPR this morning. The story that caught my ear was about a small farm in Alabama that was going out of business. The reason given; they couldn't get any illegal aliens to work cheap due to Alabama's new immigration law. The gist of the story was we need more non-Whites to help the economy. Well last time I checked Alabama has plenty of non-Whites who were born there and more than half of them under the age of 25 are unemployed. Or better yet, back when I was a young man in Kentucky...

EXCERPT "Poor Hillary feels terrible about the way she looks, but she is so busy she isn't making time for her own needs." Making things even worse is her husband of 35 years - who's battled his own weight woes until becoming thinner recently. Bill pointed out that she needed to do something, sources say . "When Hillary asked him how she looked, he told her, 'You're huge! You need to go to a fat farm!' "Then he made things worse by saying treadmills and stair climbers were fun," a pal told The ENQUIRER. "Hillary exploded!"

A new rule being proposed by the federal Department of Transportation would require farmers to get commercial drivers licenses. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which is a part of DOT, wants to adopt standards that would reclassify all farm vehicles and implements as Commercial Motor Vehicles, officials said. Likewise, the proposal, if adopted, would require all farmers and everyone on the farm who operates any of the equipment to obtain a CDL, they added. The proposed rule change would mean that anyone who drives a tractor or operates any piece of motorized farming equipment would be required to pass...

The country is running out of time. We’re broke, nationally, and as the spendthrifts in Washington, D.C. try to discover new and increasingly dishonest, disguised methods by which to hide the scope of the impending disaster, we should be considering what it means for we, the people.There can be no doubt that they are driving us to complete and unrecoverable collapse. I can describe to you what I believe their motives to be, but that doesn’t change the reality, and I’d rather focus on what we can do about it. Time is getting short. It’s possible that there will...

AUSTIN, TX - The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is expected to issue its new proposed rule for mandatory animal traceability very shortly. While USDA already has traceability requirements as part of existing animal disease control programs, the proposed framework goes much further to require animal tagging and tracing even absent any active disease threat. The framework has raised significant concerns among family farm and ranch advocates, who criticize the agency for failing to provide a coherent, factual explanation for the new program’s necessity. “USDA brags about the success of past programs, but has abandoned the principles that made them...

From a runner-bean spotted spiralling along the balcony balustrade of a Beijing apartment, to long waiting-lists for allotments, a plethora of gardening websites and a mushrooming of organic farms and shops, Chinese families are increasingly looking to "grow their own". In recent years China has been hit by a number of food scandals and fears about safety have lingered. In 2008, 300,000 babies became seriously ill and six babies died after being given formula contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine. In April this year, police seized 40 tons of beansprouts which had been treated with dangerous growth promoting chemicals and...

BONAPARTE, Iowa, March 1 (UPI) -- Experts said a 4.1-ounce egg laid by an Iowa chicken is unusual, but not without precedent. Nathan Batten, 37, said Aussie, a black Australorp chicken, laid the egg measuring 3 1/2-inches long and 6 1/2 inches in circumference at his farm near Bonaparte Feb. 18, The Des Moines Register reported Monday. The egg weighs about twice as much as an egg labeled large by U.S. Department of Agriculture standards and exceeds the average 2 1/2 ounces for a jumbo egg. Sean Skeehan, who raises chickens at Blue Gate Farm in Chariton, said egg size...

...and he filled tanks feeding the boat’s 200 horsepower Mercury engine with gas that had been blended with 10 percent ethanol. “I heard a station in Greenville had straight gas, but I just took it to the next one I could find. Within 10 minutes, my engine started failing,” Gray said. “(The ethanol) had crystallized and crumbled and had clogged my fuel line, and I had to tear out all of the fuel system.” Gray saved hundreds of dollars by repairing it himself, but his troubles with the motor are nothing new to marine shop owners, lawn mower mechanics and...

Vows by Congressional Republicans to slash billions from the federal budget at a time when joblessness is high and the economy needs stimulus are reckless. But here is one big-ticket saving that all members of Congress should get behind: cutting the billions of dollars in farm subsidies that distort food prices, encourage overfarming and inflate the price of land. The government spends $10 billion to $30 billion a year subsidizing mainly large-scale farmers. That includes: $5 billion in direct payments that are delivered regardless of what or even whether farmers plant; up to $7 billion in “marketing loans” that effectively...

The public choice school of economics describes how the government and special interests collude against the public good, and it's hard to think of a better model than the ethanol industry. Despite opposition from an emerging left-right anti-boondoggle coalition, the Senate version of the White House-GOP tax deal preserves the corn fuel's multiple subsidies. One measure of ethanol's political clout is that reformers merely hoped to cut the tax credit for blending ethanol into gasoline to 36 cents per gallon from the current 45 cents that was due to expire at the end of the year. Instead, the deal keeps...

This past Tuesday, Nov 30th, the Democratically-controlled lame-duck House passed the $1.2 billion Black Farmer’s Settlement funding known as Pigford II. The previous week the bill had passed the Senate with assurances of strict measures to protect the taxpayers against the rampant fraud that has been widely documented from multiple sources in both the media and government. The bill passed the House 256-152, and is now headed to President Obama to sign: the man who single-handedly introduced the Pigford II legislation in 2007 to curry favor with rural black Southern voters, to which he was trailing significantly to then front-runner...

"It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol," said Gore, speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank. "First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small. Gore: "It's hard once such a programme is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going. One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the...

Between 950 and 1,000 dead pigs were found Monday on a Fulton County farm where they had apparently been abandoned months ago to die of starvation.M Humane Society Police Officer Dennis Bumbaugh said he has never seen anything like it before. He said the incident may be the largest of its kind in Pennsylvania's history. "I was horrified when I opened the door and saw what I saw," he said during a phone interview Tuesday. Bumbaugh was on his way to the Union Township farm of Daniel and Kerron Clark to begin counting the carcasses and assessing the evidence. The...

PULASKI COUNTY, Mo. (Oct. 26, 2010) — Staff members for Vicky Hartzler’s congressional campaign to unseat U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton announced Monday that they’ve appointed three Fourth District residents, including Dixon rancher Charles Bassett, to serve as leaders of the campaign’s “Farmers and Ranchers Coalition.” Other members are Brent Heid of Hartzler’s hometown of Harrisonville and Dwayne Schad of Versailles. Bassett, who is the father-in-law of State Rep. David Day of Dixon and a relative of incoming county clerk Brent Bassett, has run a cow-calf operation for nearly 50 years, has known Hartzler for nearly a decade, and was an...

OKLAHOMA CITY -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering a crackdown on farm dust, so senators have signed a letter addressing their concerns on the possible regulations. Many in the Oklahoma farming industry are opposed to the EPA's consideration. One farmer said the possible regulations are ridiculous. Roberts, a fourth generation farmer and rancher in Arcadia, said regulating dust in rural areas will hurt farmers' harvest, cultivation and livelihood. "Anytime you work ground, you're going to have dust. I don't know how they'll regulate it," Roberts said. "The regulations are going to put us down and keep us from...

If there are only 39,697 African-American farmers grand total in the entire country, then how can over 86,000 of them claim discrimination at the hands of the USDA? Where did the other 46,303 come from? Now, if you’re confused over what the heck I’m even talking about, let’s go back to the beginning of the story: Pigford v. Glickman In 1997, 400 African-American farmers sued the United States Department of Agriculture, alleging that they had been unfairly denied USDA loans due to racial discrimination during the period 1983 to 1997. The farmers won the case, known as Pigford v. Glickman,...

Here's the video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_xCeItxbQY And here's the link to what Andrew Breitbart had to say about it - http://biggovernment.com/abreitbart/2010/07/19/video-proof-the-naacp-awards-racism2010/ In a nutshell, a US Gov appointed official is on tape saying “The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing, but he had come to me for help. What he didn't know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me...

Algae. "Bio-fuel." After your latest prayer for God's solution to the Gulf catastrophe, please get comfortable in your chair and peruse this. You may wish to read this more than once and to read the linked documentation. And lest you think JoAnne and her friends are nutty, I have spoken with her and, for example, asked her if she believes the Deepwater Horzon gusher was started intentionally. And what did she say? "I don't know." Do you? I.O. does not suggest that the grand plan is to make one vast algae farm of the Gulf of Mexico, but mega-manipulators, mega-racketeers,...

"It's a perverse use of eminent domain," says Brian Rainville. “There is no public good here." He stood on a green field, filled with alfalfa and grass, on the gentle rolling hills of his family's Franklin, Vermont farm… just steps from the Canadian border. He says the barn dates back to 1800, and the land is on the national registry of historic places. But Brian’s family, who have been dairy farmers here since 1946, may not have the land much longer. The United States Government says it needs 4.9 acres of the family’s property to help protect national security. The...