agriculture definition

James Ming Chen, An Agricultural Law Jeremiad: The Harvest Is Past, the Summer Is Ended, and Seed Is Not Saved , 2014 Wisconsin Law Review (forthcoming), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2387998 or http://bit.ly/SeedIsNotSaved : The saving of seed exerts a powerful rhetorical grip on American agricultural law and policy. Simply put, farmers want to save seed. Many farmers, and many of their advocates, believe that saving seed is essential to farming. But it is not. Farmers today often buy seed, just as they buy other agricultural inputs. That way lies the path of economic and technological evolution in agriculture. Seed-saving advocates protest that compelling farmers to buy seed every season effectively subjects them to a form of serfdom. So be it. Intellectual property law concerns the progress of science and the useful arts. Collateral economic and social damage, in the form of affronts to the agrarian ego, is of no valid legal concern. The harvest is past, the summ

2014 Rural Sociological Society Annual Conference : �Equity, Democracy, and the Commons: Counter-Narratives for Rural Transformation.� Location: New Orleans, Roosevelt Waldorf Astoria Hotel Date: July 30th to August 3, 2014 Paper Abstracts due: March 3 Submission: Email abstracts (up to 350-words) to Loka Ashwood (ashwood@wisc.edu) and Kate Mactavish (kate.mactavish@oregonstate.edu)  in lieu of an online submission . Changing community and production dynamics in rural America make it a state-sanctioned site for some of the most hazardous and toxic industries of our time.  From its production treadmill, industrial agriculture has cast onto rural America a plethora of negative externalities:  mounting levels of air and water pollution, farm consolidation, and depopulation.   A range of extraction and other risky industries justify the siting of facilities in rural areas because of easy access to ample natural resources, sparse populations that reduce exposure risk, and the possibility of

Last year, the LL.M. Program in Agricultural & Food Law at the University of Arkansas School of Law began the   Food Recovery Project .  The goal of this Project is to raise awareness of two fundamentally irreconcilable problems: the overwhelming waste of food and the persistent problem of hunger in America. The project is designed to provide resources, legal information, and other information that will encourage and support businesses in developing and implementing food recovery programs. This Project was funded by generous support from The Women�s Giving Circle.   Research Fellow,   James Haley   began the Project by doing a comprehensive study of food recovery and the law and prepared A Legal Guide to The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act .   This article, written for attorneys, is published in the University of Arkansas School of Law's online journal, Law Notes. Visiting Professor  Nicole Civita  then produced a guide that explains the legal liability protectio

Melissa Mortazavi , Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School kindly agreed to serve as reporter for the educational session of the Agricultural & Food Law Section of the  Association of American Law Schools  (AALA) Annual Meeting in New York City, January 2-5.  This post is based substantially on her report republished from the Food Law Professors blog. We had excellent attendance at the section session, despite extremely difficult weather conditions . The panel spoke on teaching food law & policy and integrating food law into law schools' curricula. Unfortunately, section chair and panel organized, Professor Neil Hamilton , the Dwight D. Opperman Chair of Law and the Director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University Law School and panel member Professor Jay Mitchell , the Director of the Organizations and Transactions Clinic at Stanford Law School were both unable to attend due to the weather conditions. Panel members who presented were Susan A