What’s the Beef?

Slow Food USA is offering a free, online panel discussion about meat that it’s framing as a way to begin talking about the 2023 Farm Bill.

Join us to examine the impacts of industrial-scale livestock production. We’ll hear perspectives from small-scale farmers and ranchers, humane animal husbandry, regenerative environmental practices, climate impact, and meat and poultry workers. This will serve as a launch point for the 2023 Farm Bill discussions. We’ll focus on Representative Pingree’s Agriculture Resilience Act (ARA) and Senator Booker’s Farm System Reform Act. After our conversation, we’ll give you simple steps to call your legislators to support the bills. This panel is curated by our National Food and Farm Policy committee.
https://slowfoodusa.org/slow-food-live/

A Slow Meat Panel with Matthew Raiford, Wednesday, February 10, 11am PST/2pm EST

Agriculture Resilience Act

This bill, introduced by Chellie Pingree, is dead this session, but bills that fail aren’t necessarily gone. They can be reintroduced, sometimes modified in ways that make them more passable. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition considers the bill one of the good things that happened in agriculture in 2020, so it’s something I’d like to look into when I’ve recovered from the holidays. Consider this post a tip or a placeholder. Here are a few links…

Nuts and bolts info from GovTrak

RFD TV did a story on the bill, in which they mention a white paper by the Rodale Institute. The paper says regenerative agriculture could sequester ALL of our annual carbon emissions.

Lobbyists

This arrived with my email today, as part of an announcement for a series of virtual talks with more than 50 prominent organic farmers, scientists, and climate activists. Chellie Pingree, quoted above and said to be under consideration for Biden’s secretary of agriculture, is one of the speakers . You can read more about the symposium by following this link, but it’s those data that I found chilling. 12,000 lobbyists! $350 million a year!