The Organic & Non-GMO Report Newsletter

Compeer joins Land Core initiative to decrease financial risk of adopting soil health practices

Compeer Financial, Farm Credit cooperative based in the Upper Midwest, and non-profit organization, Land Core, establish partnership to pilot Land Core’s predictive model of risk mitigating benefits of soil health practices. Compeer Financial and Land Core have announced a new partnership in which the member-owned Farm Credit cooperative will support the soil health non-profit’s cross-sector […]

Conservationists and farmers sue over Trump administration removal of most GMO regulations

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) and allied plaintiffs recently filed a new federal lawsuit challenging the 2020 decision by the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) to eliminate most genetically modified organism oversight, including future GMO crops, trees, and grasses. Previously nearly all GMO plants had to go through formal USDA approval before open […]

GM crops cannot succeed in Africa

It’s a model not designed to match the African smallholder farming system—and with rare exceptions, it’s failing in a big way. Canadian Associate Professor Matthew Schnurr argues in a new book that genetically modified crop technology, with its “large scale, heavily capitalized, mechanized monoculture,” is suited to industrial agriculture without considering the geographic, social, ecological, […]

National Institutes of Health links dicamba to increased risk of cancer

A study from the U.S. National Institutes of Health warns that use of the pesticide dicamba increases risk of liver and intrahepatic bile duct cancers, acute and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and mantle cell lymphoma. The comprehensive study, published in International Journal of Epidemiology, followed nearly 50,000 pesticide applicators’ use of dicamba for two decades in […]

New paper: Organic farming significantly lessens reliance on pesticides, reduces dietary risks of pesticide residues in foods

A new paper from the Heartland Health Research Alliance (HHRA) published in the peer-reviewed journal Agronomy reports significantly lower use of pesticides in organic farming and reduced risks of pesticide residues in foods. Organic farms use pesticides far less often and less intensively than on nearby conventional farms growing the same crop (see the chart […]