agriculture definition

This commentary is offered by guest blogger, Todd Heyman, an attorney candidate in the LL.M. Program in Agricultural & Food Law at the University of Arkansas School of Law.  Todd's bio appears at the conclusion of the post. On October 31, 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice seeking public comment on the Clean Water Act�s regulations applicable to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).  Comments are to be received by December 31, 2012. Given this is also the Clean Water Act�s 40th anniversary, it seems appropriate to take a look at the current regulatory treatment of CAFOs and determine where it might be headed. EPA is required to seek comments on the regulations pursuant to the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA), which was enacted to protect small businesses from excessive regulation that might unfairly impede their ability to compete with larger business entities.  The RFA requires that an agency examine a regulation�s potential effect on

This Mark Bittman story  in the annual  NYT Magazine  food and drink issue appeared last month under several headlines: Heavenly Food California's Central Valley:  Land of a Million Vegetables Everyone Eats There It is this last headline that has stuck with me--and continued to agitate me.  This is because I find the headline misleading or--perhaps more precisely--because it tells only part of the story.  Bittman's piece is an homage, of sorts, to California's Central Valley, which produces more than a third of the produce grown in the United States.  Bittman writes: The valley became widely known in the 1920s and 1930s, when farmers arrived from Virginia or Armenia or Italy or (like Tom Joad) Oklahoma and wrote home about the clean air, plentiful water and cheap land. ... Unlike the Midwest, which concentrates (devastatingly) on corn and soybeans, more than 230 crops are grown in the valley, including those indigenous to South Asia, Southeast Asia and Mexico, some of which