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Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential search is centering on three main contenders, with an announcement expected as soon as Friday as the Democrat prepares for her party’s national convention next week ... Clinton VP search said to be focusing on Kaine, Vilsack, Perez - Wed, 20 Jul 2016 PST

Tom Vilsack speaks out on school meals and nutrition. You may control the playback using this player control, changing the volume or moving ahead or replaying an earlier portion: Flash Player upgrade required. Click in the square area above to Pause or …

#GMO #Obama #Vilsack #Monsanto #Crony #Corporatism #Agriculture

Kidding. Of course. The 112th Congress was one of the least productive and most polarized in history, and we couldn’t be happier to see it go. We hope the 113th Congress, substantially more diverse and a bit more progressive than the last, will advocate for working families and small businesses (like our farmers!) rather than standing in the way of progress in order to protect low taxes for the wealthy.  We wouldn’t have time to get to them all, but we wanted to take an opportunity to talk about one of the more absurd parts of the machinations that culminated in our fall off the fiscal cliff and and the subsequent scramble back up. The “milk cliff,” as a were, was a result of the Farm Bill of 2008, which re-established subsidies for dairy farmers across the country that had been in place for the last quarter-century and kept milk prices relatively low. It was set to expire Jan 1, and would’ve legally required the Secretary of Agriculture to set a floor for milk prices for about two times what it is now. On the edge of the wire, Congress reauthorized certain parts of the 2008 Farm Bill, but failed to pass any comprehensive reforms, keeping dairy prices low and farmers frustrated. (Had we gone over the milk cliff, smaller farmers would have actually benefited from higher prices.) All of this makes for fairly scintillating talk--when dominating topics on A1, week after week, were about complicated possibilities like sequestration, it was both easy and a bit of a relief for journalists to write about the idea that your slow-churned ice cream may get a bit more expensive, especially when inundated by press releases from Big Agriculture that made the story much more sensationalist than it was. But we at the Root Cellar implore both journalists and media consumers not to be uncritical producers and consumers of the news. If we take a closer look at the policy cobbled together at the last minute to avoid the cliff, it’s not the idea that your weekly crème brûlée would have put a bigger dent in your pocket that’s worth getting up in arms over (though, if you are, that’s understandable).  The deal ushered through the House and Senate left an astounding number of policies in suspension. There was no commodity subsidy reform, no disaster assistance in the middle of a yearlong drought, and no extension of funding for farmers markets, rural microenterprise assistance, beginning/minority farmers, or organic research. Particularly heartbreaking, we feel, is the fact that Congress was on the cusp of passing a five-year comprehensive plan--it had made its way through the Senate and the House Agriculture Committee--that was scrapped in favor of a nine-month extension that was, itself, and extension of antiquated policy. “It's not just farming. As important as that is, that's a part of this bill. Really what we're talking about is a strategy, a vision, a plan for rural America,” says Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack of the comprehensive plan. “And rural America provides and contributes so much to the rest of the country that it's the reason why this should be a priority, and it hasn't been.” The fact that Congress chose short-term satisfaction over long-term reform is disappointing, but not particularly surprising. The fact that this is all happening as journalists choose to make “Mooooove over, fiscal cliff” puns instead of focusing on what’s going on? Even worse.  Further reading. Questions? Comments? Let us know.  

- Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack. Has the Republican party shunned its rural base? Do the "job creators" not care about "food creators"?

- Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack