Free Republic

Imagine being told to do an assignment by your boss and instead of following orders or having a conversation about why you cannot complete the job, you simply stood up and turned your back on him. You would probably be fired, right? Well, not if you work for the federal government. Yesterday, a group of federal employees literally stood up and turned their backs on Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue after being told they would be relocated to Kansas. The Hill reports that Sec. Perdue "announced Thursday that two of the Department of Agriculture’s research agencies, the Economic Research Service...

One day in late spring in the early days of the George W. Bush administration, FDA inspectors visited the headquarters of Sargento cheese in Plymouth, Wisconsin—a routine visit as part of the federal government's efforts to ensure the safety of the food we eat. The inspectors took samples of cheese to test for bacteria. Sargento conducted tests on cheese from the same lot. A week later, the results from both sets of tests were in—the cheese was bacteria-free. Sargento, having gotten the all-clear from the government, shipped the cheese to stores across the country. Two months later, however, the FDA...

...[T]here was one other, far more important data point released by the government's Department of Agriculture, sufficiently late after the market close to impact no risk assets. That data point of course was foodstamps (or the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka SNAP), and we are confident that no readers will be surprised to learn that foodstamp usage for both persons and households, has jumped to a new all time record. At 46,681,833 million the persons hooked on SNAP, the July number crossed the previous record posted a short month before, as the foodstamp curve continues 'plumbing' newer and greater...

Products based on NASA Earth observations and a new Internet-based decision tool are providing information to help land and water managers combat tamarisk (saltcedar), an invasive plant species damaging precious water supplies in the western United States. This decision tool, called the Invasive Species Forecasting System (ISFS), is being used at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Institute of Invasive Species Science in Fort Collins, Colo. It is the result of combining USGS science and NASA Earth observations, software engineering and high- performance computing expertise. "The ISFS combines NASA satellite data with tens of thousands of field sampling measurements, which...

Republicans are desperately trying to downplay South Dakota’s election last week, in which Democrat Stephanie Herseth eked out a win over Republican State Senator Larry Diedrich. However, the grim truth of that race is that it may portend major problems for the GOP in this part of the country during the upcoming fall elections. Agriculture, the economic backbone of this region, has been hit hard by wrongheaded policies on the part of the Department of Agriculture, and in particular the apparent hostility of USDA chief Ann Veneman towards America’s beef producers. Among those whose livelihood is raising cattle, the ultimate...

Tests Show U.S. Failure to Block Contamination From Gene-Altered Varieties Much of the U.S. supply of ordinary crop seeds has become contaminated with strands of engineered DNA, suggesting that current methods for segregating gene-altered seed plants from traditional varieties are failing, according to a pilot study released yesterday. More than two-thirds of 36 conventional corn, soy and canola seed batches contained traces of DNA from genetically engineered crop varieties in lab tests commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based advocacy group. The actual amount of foreign DNA present in U.S. seeds appears to be small, and most engineered...

A new report commissioned by the government suggests that it will be difficult to completely prevent genetically engineered plants and animals from having unintended environmental and public health effects. The report, released yesterday by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, says that while there are many techniques being developed to prevent genetically engineered organisms or their genes from escaping into the wild, most techniques are still in early development and none appear to be completely effective. "One of our big messages throughout the whole report is that there are very few bioconfinement methods that are well...

Posted on Mon, Oct. 20, 2003 Revising the pyramid Marian Uhlman Inquirer Staff Writer The Food Guide Pyramid was supposed to make healthy eating easier. You would hardly know it by the criticism the pyramid has provoked since its earliest days. The government-crafted pyramid has been panned because it didn't distinguish good fats from bad ones, or whole grains from refined. It has been criticized because it failed to address vegetarian diets, promoted too many carbohydrates, neglected to mention water, and even lumped beans and nuts together with meat, poultry and eggs. The critics now see a chance to right...

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - A federal judge ruled Friday that the national beef checkoff is constitutional, even as similar programs have been struck down by other federal judges as a violation of free speech. U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull's decision came in the case of a Montana ranching couple who refused to pay $1-per-head tax on some cattle, and faced more than $12,000 in penalties and past charges. Steve and Jeanne Charter argued that the checkoff violated their rights as independent producers by forcing them to pay for advertising campaigns they didn't necessarily agree with. Half of the money from...