Food and Agriculture News: 5/26/22

Food and Agriculture News: 5/26/22

Atlanta teacher turns bees' death into valuable lesson - Axios

 

Love this story! Well, obviously not the bees dying. That’s a tragedy. But really a lemons to lemonade story courtesy of Meghan McCloskey, a teacher and beekeeper at Springdale Park Elementary School in Atlanta. McCloskey saved about 15,000 bees, and was able to teach her students a valuable lesson in the process. Let’s hope some of those students are inspired to carry that work forward. 

 

Hell in Amy’s Kitchen: The ‘socially responsible’ company downplays the flood of complaints from its largely Latina workforce, but has paid over $100,000 to OSHA for multiple health and safety violations. - Prospect 

 

I’ve been thinking about trust quite a lot recently. There are so many deceiving food labels out there – we recently bought some salad dressing with a large strawberry image on it only to look at the label and see “does not contain strawberries” on the back. What a joke. 

 

Anyway, this case is much worse. People’s lives are at stake here. And while violations like these occur up and down the food chain, it’s soul-sucking when companies who project a socially responsible image end up being just as bad as the rest. 

 

Indoor Ag Has An Energy Problem. Could Microgrids Be The Solution? - Agritecture 

 

One of our first interviews on Farmers Jam Radio was with Henry Gordon-Smith, founder of Agritecture, who railed against indoor farming companies for greenwashing. This is a huge part of that conversation.

 

There’s not much benefit to growing local food if you’re simply spewing carbon emissions with all the light fixtures. But this article hits upon something crucial - that food and energy are two birds of the same feather. I don’t believe we will solve one without the other, and that we’d be much better off trying to solve them as one problem. Local food and local energy are critical to solve the carbon problem, and will increase jobs and national security at the same time. Good stuff here.

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