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ASWM is keeping an eye on the development of the 2012 Farm Bill. On this page you can find updates on the Farm Bill as well as agricultural news in the context of wetlands and related issues. For Farm Bill 2012 resources on the web, click here.
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Monday, 04 March 2013 00:00 |
By Mikkel Pates – AgWeek – February 20, 2013North Dakota’s congressional delegation members say they’ll work to run a new, five-year farm bill up the congressional flagpole again in the next few months. All offer optimism the bill can pass this year. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., at the Fargo Holiday Inn, on Feb. 20, led an ag issues roundtable discussion that included colleagues Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. About 20 leaders from most commodity and farm groups in the state attended the meeting, which is the first of its type since Heitkamp and Cramer have been elected to their posts. For full story, click here. |
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Friday, 01 March 2013 00:00 |
By Claire Kremen, Alastair Iles, and Christopher Bacon – Ecology and Society – 2012 This Special Issue on Diversified Farming Systems is motivated by a desire to understand how agriculture designed according to whole systems, agroecological principles can contribute to creating a more sustainable, socially just, and secure global food system. We first define Diversified Farming Systems (DFS) as farming practices and landscapes that intentionally include functional biodiversity at multiple spatial and/or temporal scales in order to maintain ecosystem services that provide critical inputs to agriculture, such as soil fertility, pest and disease control, water use efficiency, and pollination. We explore to what extent DFS overlap or are differentiated from existing concepts such as sustainable, multifunctional, organic or ecoagriculture. DFS are components of social-ecological systems that depend on certain combinations of traditional and contemporary knowledge, cultures, practices, and governance structures. Further, as ecosystem services are generated and regenerated within a DFS, the resulting social benefits in turn support the maintenance of the DFS, enhancing its ability to provision these services sustainably. We explore how social institutions, particularly alternative agri-food networks and agrarian movements, may serve to promote DFS approaches, but note that such networks and movements have other primary goals and are not always explicitly connected to the environmental and agroecological concerns embodied within the DFS concept. We examine global trends in agriculture to investigate to what extent industrialized forms of agriculture are replacing former DFS, assess the current and potential contributions of DFS to food security, food sovereignty and the global food supply, and determine where and under what circumstances DFS are expanding rather than contracting. To read full paper, click here.
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Monday, 18 February 2013 17:17 |
By Rich Keller – Dairy Herd Network – February 14, 2013The seventh analysis of the St. Johns Bayou and New Madrid Floodway Project has been completed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, and the Corps apparently is ready to take on government agencies, environmentalist, and scientist groups who oppose closing the quarter-mile gap in the levee along the Missouri portion of the Mississippi River. The closing of the levee gap would make farming on the New Madrid flood plain much more profitable for farmers who lose crops or are hindered in planting because of flooding every three to five years. Around 100,000 acres are currently farmed in the flood plain. The concern is that as much as 55,000 acres of “wetlands that provide backwater habitat for fish and waterfowl” would be destroyed by completing the Corps plan. For full story, click here. For a related NWF fact sheet with useful map, see this PDF.
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By Lisa Palmer – New York Times Green Blog – February 15, 2013
Nutrient pollution is a growing problem along the Upper Mississippi, where water rich in nitrogen and phosphates from crop fertilizer flows directly into the river without the benefit of wetland filtration. The problem is particularly acute in the levee region of southern Iowa, where farmers are groping for a remedy. The polluted water eventually reaches the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone that now spans 6,700 square miles and costs fisheries $2.8 billion per year. For full blog post, click here. |
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Thursday, 14 February 2013 00:00 |
By Juliet Eilperin – The Washington Post – February 10, 2013An engineering project introduced during the Eisenhower administration may be carried out during the Obama administration, but with no more consensus now than over the past 60 years. The plan to plug a quarter-mile gap in an enormous levee along the Mississippi River and install two pumping stations would help control flooding in southeastern Missouri, but it requires draining as much as 55,000 acres of wetlands that provide backwater habitat for fish and waterfowl. For full story, click here.
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