February 27, 2015
There is a fantastic article in Inc.com on the rise of GT’s Kombucha, the company credited with creating the kombucha product category we know today. They hit a few legal snags along the way, which we will discuss in a blog post next week, but otherwise it’s an inspiring story of a bootstrapped, profitable, privately and closely held company with a dominant market share.- Farmanddairy.com describes the regulatory challenges faced by nonprofit seed libraries, where farmers, gardeners, and growers can exchange self-pollinating seeds rather than buy them from the catalogue or the hardware store. Laws in several states make no distinction between these small, informal groups and larger commercial seed companies – both are regulated as seed distributors and must comply with inspection and labeling requirements.
- A California lawmaker is considering a law to include warning labels on soft drinks. The label will state: “contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay.”
- KVNO News does a really good job of explaining why Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) is so important for farmers and ranchers. As you might know, in October the World Trade Organization determined that US COOL labeling constituted an unfair restrain on world trade. COOL is important to US farmers, who understand that that consumers will have a natural bias for meat raised domestically. COOL is less important to meat packers, who prefer to fill their orders with meat produced as cheaply and efficiently as possible, no matter where it is raised. Read the whole thing.
- Fun fact: AMTRAK’s food and beverage service lost an average of $87 Million in the years between 2006 and 2012. A bill before the House will require AMTRAK to eliminate the operating loss within 5 years.
- Agriview covers the story of a farmer who fled falling prices for commodity milk and started producing artisanal cheeses for the direct market.
- NPR delves once again into immigration status and farm labor. One farmer interviewed for the piece tacitly admits that he prefers to have the immigration status of his workers remain indeterminate. Farming, he says, is an industry where illegal immigrants can work and remain off of the radar. If they were to become legal, “that pressure is off. Now they can go to the cities and look for construction jobs, or manufacturing jobs” and thus create acute employment problem for him. That’s admirably candid of him, but unfortunate for the laborer.
- Michele writes about our declining appetite for red meat and the factors leading to our decreasing consumption in Al Jazeera America.
- Finally, an extended read for the weekend fireside. Washingtonian writes about the spectacular implosion of Serendipity 3 in 2014. It all started with a bad partnership agreement, then some stuff got broken and everybody got mad and someone almost went to jail but then no one ate ice cream anymore and it was sad.
