Farm bill proposal: Strengthen subsidy limits, boost land stewardship
With its toothless payment limits, the U.S. farm program directs billions of dollars a year to the largest and wealthiest farmers in America while struggling family farmers often are overlooked, said the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. It called for farm bill reforms that would direct more funding to soil and water conservation and restrict subsidies to big operators.
On social media, universal free school lunch is popular
Far more people on social media support free meals for all public school students than oppose it, 43 percent vs. 3 percent, according to an analysis by Impact Social, an online monitoring company, in collaboration with the food policy publication Food Fix.
Say it ain’t so Joe!!
Why America’s food-security crisis is also a water-security crisis
Deepak Palakshappa’s clinic team asks two simple questions of every patient to ascertain whether they’ll run out of food in a given month. But there are some critical questions they don’t ask: Do you drink your tap water? Is it potable and ample? Can you cook food with it, and use it to mix infant formula and cereal? Such questions could uncover some of the millions of Americans who are water insecure—a circumstance directly connected to food insecurity.
TODAY’S QUICK HITS
Record dam-removal project: U.S. regulators approved a plan to demolish four dams on the lower Klamath River and open hundreds of miles of salmon habitat in the largest dam-removal and river-restoration project in the world. (AP)
House Ag goes Cuba: A delegation of three House Agriculture Committee members is headed to Cuba to assess the country’s food and agriculture situation. (House Agriculture)
State bans pen aquaculture: Washington State Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz announced the state would prohibit commercial finfish farming on state-owned aquatic lands in an effort to protect native wild salmon. (Washington Department of Natural Resources)
Protection for lesser prairie-chicken: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the lesser prairie-chicken under the Endangered Species Act and said it would seek voluntary agreements with stakeholders to protect the bird and its habitat. (Interior Department)
Grain stockpile shrinks: The world grain stockpile will decline for the sixth year in a row this marketing year, due almost entirely to a drawdown of the corn inventory to its smallest level in a decade. (International Grains Council)
ON THE CALENDAR
Monday
President Biden pardons the National Thanksgiving Turkey in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House, the 75th time the ceremony has been performed.
Farmdoc holds 2022 Farm Assets Conference, Champaign, Illinois.
USDA releases weekly Crop Progress report, 4 p.m. ET.
Tuesday
USDA releases monthly Food Price Index report, 9 a.m. ET. At present, food prices are forecast to rise 10 percent this year, compared to prices during 2021, and 3.5 percent in 2023.
USDA releases monthly Cold Storage report, 3 p.m. ET.
Wednesday
USDA releases semi-annual Farm Labor report, 3 p.m. ET.
Thursday
Thanksgiving Day, a holiday that began during colonial times as a harvest feast and became an annual national holiday by proclamation of President Lincoln in 1863, during the Civil War, “to heal the wounds of the nation” and commend care of “widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife.” Lincoln chose the final Thursday of November. President Franklin Roosevelt advanced it by a week, in 1939, to spur the economy during the Great Recession. Congress passed a law in 1941 setting Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. The American celebration of Thanksgiving as a response to the fall harvest “falls under a category of festivals that spans cultures, continents and millennia,” says History.com. “Historians have noted that Native Americans had a rich tradition of commemorating the fall harvest with feasting and merrymaking long before Europeans set foot on their shores.”
