The Organic & Non-GMO Report Newsletter

Missouri farmers embrace cover crops with federal and state assistance

Cover cropping is known to prevent soil erosion and create efficient water cycles, and Missouri farmers are seeing the benefits. The 2017 Census of Agriculture highlighted cover crops as the third most planted crop in the state. Cover crop acreage has doubled in five years, to 850,000 acres. Corn and soybean farmer John Hemme cites […]

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 […]