ATTRA/NCAT is one the most comprehensive, credible and influential organizations involved in creating a sustainable, profitable economy for rural areas, and those of us who are country people know that means farming!

(Myself, I was born in a town of 85 people in south central Vermont, years before the introduction of pavement, electricity or telephones...)

Second generation transgenic crops are being designed more for expression of traits useful to processors than to farmers. Doing so complete the industrialization of the farm and finishes the long term trend toward making farmers producers of industrial inputs rather than simply (but more importantly) food and fiber.

So now farming really has been reduced to manufacturing, but with that old sad twist we've heard before: the farmer is the only businessperson forced to buy their imputs at retail and sell all their outputs at wholesale. Read more about it here.

Researchers at the University of California -- San Diego have identified a molecule in the gut of caterpillars and roundworms that is responsible for their susceptibility to Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin, which is widely used by organic farmers, and has been genetically engineered into some corn hybrids to kill corn earworm and rootworm.

Since Bt is non-toxic to humans, one new idea that has come out of this work is to create a pill for that would kill roundworms, human parasites that in the developing world can cause both river blindness and elephantisis.

The research paper is available in the journal Science.

This past Friday I paid a visit to the Virginia piedmont, just over the Blue Ridge from the Shenandoah Valley, where I was raised. I was headed to Ayrshire Farm, where Sandy Lerner has done a wonderful job of restoring a classic Piedmont farm to its glory. It is, as the website notes "a working farm that has met the 21st century with one foot firmly planted in the 19th."

The occasion was a conference for Piedmont farmers who are considering an entry into the organic meat market. As many of you certainly know, organic meat is the fastest growing sector of the organic market (79% a year), which is the fastest growing section of American agriculture (20% a year). This has had the effect (fortunate from the perspective of grain farmers and unfortunate as far as prospective organic meat producers are concerned) of raising organic grain prices to record levels. To get a sense of just how high prices are -- if you can find any organic grain at all to buy -- then check out the New Farm Organic Price Index and look at what organic #2 Yellow Corn is bringing in your area! But there is a solution...

Now the Vermont Public Interest Research Group has released a report on the threat of transgenic crops to the continued growth of certified organic agriculture in Vermont, even within the overall continued decline of agriculture in the state.

This is a problem no one seems to want to talk about, though everyone knows it to be true: that the ag input companies might just walk away from the ag market after creating dependencies (and attendant, persistent problems) for producers who have no other "business" they would rather be in...

MONTPELIER, VT -- The Farmer Protection Act (s.18) passed out of the Senate Agriculture Committee this morning on a voice vote. The committee expressed its intention to move the bill to the Judiciary Committee, as the bill deals with liability, contract, and patent infringement issues that face Vermont's family farmers because of the presence of genetically engineered crops in the state.

The change will exempt producers and marketers operating under a National Organic Program-approved organic system plan from paying assessments, provided they produce and market only commodities eligible for a '100% organic' label.

"...Preliminary results suggest that the non-transgenic corn hybrids were better able to take advantage of the available nutrients in the Clarion soil than were the transgenic hybrids....the non-transgenic hybrids also were better able to respond to fertilizer placement."