Factory farmers typically mix low doses of antibiotics (lower than the amount used to treat an actual disease or infection) into animals' feed and water to promote their growth and to preempt outbreaks of disease in the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions.

Food & Water Watch
Food Safety Consequences of Factory Farms

Today, many of the meat and dairy products sold in the United States come from factory farms - industrial-scale facilities where tens of thousands of animals are crowded together in tight conditions and cannot carry out normal behaviors such as grazing, rooting and pecking.

The environmental and economic effects of factory farms on rural communities are well known. These facilities cannot process the enormous amounts of waste produced by thousands of animals, so they pour and pile manure into large cesspools and spray it onto the land. This causes health problems for workers and for neighbors. Leaks and spills from manure pools, and the run-off from manure sprayed on fields can pollute nearby rivers, streams, and groundwater. And the replacement of independently owned, small family farms by large factory operations often drains the economic health from rural communities. Rather than buying grain, animal feed, and supplies from local farmers and businesses, these factory farms usually turn to the distant corporations with which they're affiliated.

But even if you live in a city hundreds of miles from the nearest factory farm, there are still lots of reasons to be concerned about who is producing - and how - the meat and dairy products you and your family consume.

Animal Feed - You Are What You Eat... and What They Ate
Factory farm operators typically manage what animals eat in order to promote their growth and keep the overall costs of production low. However, what animals are fed directly affects the quality and safety of the meat and dairy products we consume.

Tom turkey showing off is beauty to some of the hens at Cedar Meadow Farm in Ledyard. You have can choose which farm you want your turkey's to come from. Many farms throughout the state raise turkey's in a humane way. Letting them scratch around in a open pen, a natural setting.

It may look a lot like our original informational site, but its now the fastest, simplest, way to get farm fresh goodness every week when its convenient for you!

Announcing our newer and easy to use eStore

After many, many, frustrating hours and effort, we launched our new eStore this week. Some of our customers were challenged with our spreadsheet method of ordering, and quite frankly, it became quite time consuming in the end. So we decided to open an eStore through Volusion.com, the same company that Crutchfield uses for their huge online merchant business. Obama used them for his email outreach and grassroots fundraising. Good enough for them...good enough for us.

We had to rethink some of how we were doing things, but in the end there was more right with going eStore than not.

Our new site allows us to highlight what all of you like the best, what our staff likes, and brand new items that become available. You can browse by category, and in the future, subcategories for those of us who like to browse and choose.

For those with more specific ends in mind you can do a search as you would on any good site or online. The first level search looks just at the product title fields while an additional click will perform a more exhaustive search. So whether you're looking for Pea Shoots or your favorite farm, its way simpler and a more enjoyable experience.

We will still allow COD by cash or check, but you can elect to pay by credit card through our PayPal account, even if you don't have a PayPal account, and for those who do...well you can just do a simple click to pay.

Please bear with us as we work out the bugs, tweak our store, and make it that much better. So are your ready to check it out and place your order? Then great! Click Here!

The Organic Trade Organization as it says in their tag line, has been cultivating a strong organic trade industry since 1985. They helped define and shape what we consider to be organic and is a good source for basic answers you may not know the answer to.

Everything you ever wanted to know about organic!

The first question you may want answered is this:
What is organic?
Organic refers to the way agricultural products--food and fiber--are grown and processed. Organic food production is based on a system of farming that maintains and replenishes soil fertility without the use of toxic and persistent pesticides and fertilizers. Organic foods are minimally processed without artificial ingredients, preservatives, or irradiation to maintain the integrity of the food.

Is there an official definition of "organic"?
The following excerpt is from the definition of "organic" that the National Organic Standards Board adopted in April 1995: "Organic agriculture is an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. It is based on minimal use of off-farm inputs and on management practices that restore, maintain and enhance ecological harmony."

What does "Certified Organic" mean?
"Certified Organic" means the item has been grown according to strict uniform standards that are verified by independent state or private organizations. Certification includes inspections of farm fields and processing facilities, detailed record keeping, and periodic testing of soil and water to ensure that growers and handlers are meeting the standards which have been set.

Click here to be directed to OTA.com (The Organic Trade Associations Official website) for answers to scores more questions you may have been afraid to ask.

Happy Hollow Farms brought this article to our attention and throught it worthy to share with everyone. It makes a lot of sense. We believe our farms follow the old way of thinking and producing the foods we deliver...

Beyond Organic

New ideas, especially those that directly challenge an established orthodoxy, follow a familiar path. First, the orthodoxy says the new idea is rubbish. Then the orthodoxy attempts to minimize the new idea's growing appeal. Finally, when the new idea proves unstoppable, the orthodoxy tries to claim the idea as its own. This is precisely the path organic food production has followed.

First, organic pioneers were ridiculed. Then, as evidence of the benefits of organic farming became more obvious to more people, mainstream chemical agriculture actively condemned organic ideas as unfeasible. Now that the food-buying public has become enthusiastic about organically grown foods, the food industry wants to take over. Toward that end the USDA-controlled national definition of "organic" is tailored to meet the marketing needs of organizations that have no connection to the agricultural integrity "organic" once represented. We now need to ask whether we want to be content with an "organic" food option that places the marketing concerns of corporate America ahead of nutrition, flavor and social benefits to consumers.

When I stated as an organic grower 35 years ago, it was a simpler world. Organic was a way of thinking rather than a "profit center." The decision to farm organically was a statement of faith in the wisdom of the natural world, to the quality of the crops and livestock, and to the nutritional benefits of properly cultivated food. It was obvious that good farming and exceptional food only resulted from the care and nurturing practiced by the good farmer.

The initial development of organic farming during the first half of the 20th century arose from the gut feelings of farmers who were trying to reconcile the biological truths they saw in their own fields with the chemical dogma the agricultural science-of-the-moment was teaching. The farmers came to very different conclusions from those of the academic agronomists. The farmers worked on developing agricultural practices that harmonized with the direction in which their "unscientific" conclusions were leading them. Their goals were to grow the most nutritious food possible, while protecting the soil for future generations.

The development and refinement of those biologically-based agricultural practices continues today. It's what makes this farming adventure so compelling. Each year I hope to do things better than I did last year because I will know Nature's systems better. But my delight in the intricacies of the natural world -- my adventure into an ever deeper appreciation of the soil-plant-animal nutrition cycle and how to optimize it -- is not acceptable to the homogenized mentality of mass marketing. The food giants that are taking over "organic" want a simplistic list of ingredients so they can do organic-by-the-numbers. They are derisive about what they label "belief systems," and they are loath to acknowledge that more farmer commitment is involved in producing real food than any number of approved inputs can encompass.

The transition of "organic" from small farm to big time is now upon us. Although getting toxic chemicals out of agriculture is an improvement we can all applaud, it only removes the negatives. The positive focus, enhancing the biological quality of the food produced, is nowhere to be seen. The new standards are based on what not to do rather than what to do. They will be administered through the USDA, whose director said recently, "Organic food does not mean it is superior, safer, or more healthy than conventional food." Well, I still agree with the old time organic pioneers. I believe that properly grown food is superior, safer and healthier. I also believe national certification bureaucracies are only necessary when food is grown by strangers in far away places rather than by neighbors whom you know. I further believe good, fresh food, grown locally by committed growers is the very best to be found.

"Organic" is now dead as a meaningful synonym for the highest quality food. Responsible growers need to identify not only that our food is grown to higher, more considered standards, but also that it is much fresher because it is grown right where it is sold. Therefore, we have come up with a new term, one we define to mean locally grown and unprocessed, in addition to exceptional quality. It's a term we hope will be used, as "organic" was used when we began, by those local growers who accept that if you care first about the quality of what you produce, a market will always be there. We now sell our produce as "Authentic Food." We invite other serious growers to join us.

BOTTLES MADE FROM PLANTS...IN THE USA

I am not a bottled water fan for the host of reason's most agree with: the energy and carbon emissions used to bottle and transport the product and worse the mountains of plastics that end up in land fills and the ocean that don't make it to the recycling plant. I do realize some areas of the world need bottled water to survive and if you must have bottled water, I am delighted to tell you about PRIMO!

A bottle made from plants? That's remarkable. And RENEWABLE!

Primo is the first nationally available bottled water whose bottle is made from plants, not crude oil! Primo offers you the convenience and great taste you're looking for - in a bottle that's friendly to the environment.

How? It's all about the plastic we use. It's called Ingeotm, the world's first and only performance plastic made from 100% annually renewable plants. All other plastic water bottles made in the United States are manufactured from petroleum, a non-renewable and diminishing resource.

Primo bottles are made from a renewable and sustainable resource, plants. Remarkable!

Visit their website to learn more about it: http://www.primowater.com

Here is just one of many reasons why you should be buying and eating locally grown ORGANIC food products.

American songbirds are being wiped out by banned pesticides

The number of migratory songbirds returning to North America has gone into sharp decline due to the unregulated use of highly toxic pesticides and other chemicals across Latin America.

Ornithologists blame the demand for out-of-season fruit and vegetables and other crops in North America and Europe for the destruction of tens of millions of passerine birds. By some counts, half of the songbirds that warbled across America's skies only 40 years ago have gone, wiped out by pesticides or loss of habitat.

Forty-six years ago, the naturalist Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a study of the ravages caused to wildlife, especially birds, by DDT. The chemical's use on American farms almost eradicated entire species, including the peregrine falcon and bald eagle.

The pesticide was banned and bird numbers recovered, but new and highly toxic pesticides banned by the US and European Union are being widely used in Latin America.

Because of changed consumer habits in Europe and the US, export-led agriculture has transformed the wintering grounds of birds into intensive farming operations producing grapes, melons and bananas as well as rice for export.

Ornithologists say another silent spring is dawning across the US as birds are being poisoned by toxic chemicals or killed as pests in their winter refuges across South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. They say that many species of songbird will never recover, and others may even become endangered or extinct if controls are not put in place or consumer habits changed.

More problems await those birds which make it home. Millions of acres of wilderness the birds use as nesting grounds have been ploughed under in the drive to grow corn for ethanol, for bio-fuel.

Some 150 species of songbirds undertake extraordinary migrations up to 12,000 miles every year as they move from the south to nesting grounds in the US and Canada every spring. Ornithologists say that almost all these species are at risk of poisoning.

The migratory songbirds in most trouble include the wood thrush, the Kentucky warbler, the eastern kingbird and the bobolink, celebrated by the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson as "the rowdy of the meadows".

Bridget Stutchbury, an ornithologist and professor at York University in Toronto, said: "With spring we take it for granted that the sound of the songbirds will fill the air with their cheerful sounds. But each year, as we continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, fewer and fewer songbirds will return."

The bobolink songbird has experienced such a steep decline, it has almost fallen off the charts. The birds migrate in flocks from Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay to the east coast of the US, feeding on grain and rice, prompting farmers to regard them as a pest. Bobolink numbers have plummeted almost 50 per cent in the past four decades, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist who studied bobolinks as they were feeding in rice paddies in Bolivia, found about half of the birds had been exposed to toxic chemicals banned in Europe and the US. Some 40 to 50 species, which include the barn swallow, the wood thrush the dickcissel as well as migratory birds of prey, are starting to disappear.

It is only recently that the decline has been definitively linked to the use of toxic pesticides in the Caribbean and across Latin America. "Everyone who has looked for pesticide poisoning in birds has found it," Professor Stutchbury said. "When we count birds during our summers we are finding significant population declines in about three dozen species of songbirds."

She wrote in the comment pages of The New York Times: "They are the modern-day canaries in the coal mine." She said: "The imported fruits and vegetables found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States."

Growers are using high doses of pesticides, which the World Health Organisation calls class I toxins. These are also toxic to humans and are either restricted or banned in the US and EU. But controls in Latin American countries are easily flouted.

"I believe that if we don't make drastic changes quite literally many birds which are common now are going to become rare," said Professor Stutchbury.

Testing by individual EU countries and the US Food and Drug Administration reveals that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three and sometimes four times as likely to violate basic standards for pesticide residues.

When I was growning up we simply turned on the faucet and filled our glass.

What ever happened to that?

Green Alternatives to Bottled Water

Demand for bottled water is quite healthy. Consumers purchased nine trillion gallons of it last year in the U.S., according to the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), an environmental think tank.

But it turns out there may be some sickening side effects.

"There are a lot of negative feelings about bottled water now," says Dr. Alex Mayer, a professor at Michigan Technological University and the director of the Michigan Tech Center for Water and Society, based in Houghton, Mich.

It costs a lot of money and energy to transport and store plastic water bottles, both of the single-use and water-cooler variety -- even more so when you factor in how double-parked delivery trucks snarl traffic in cities and suburbs.

"It's mind-boggling how much gas and oil it takes to make single-serve plastic bottles," says John Van Newenhizen, director of commercial product development at water-supplier Culligan International Corp., based in Rosemont, Ill. "It's also mind-boggling how the bottles stay in a landfill."

Many of the single-use water and soda bottles, made from polyethylene terephthalate or PETE, get recycled and end up in China being re-used to make clothing, carpets, PolarFleece and straps.

"The Chinese are the biggest users of recycled plastic bottles," says Peter H. Gleick, president of the Oakland, Calif.-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, author of "The World's Water" and a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship for his work on water issues. "No one else comes close."

Still, about 86 percent of water bottles in the U.S. are not recycled, according to the Washington, D.C.-based EPI.

Thirty-eight billion bottles are plowed into landfills every year, according to Lindsay McKinley, a spokeswoman for PUR Water Filtration System, owned by the home products giant Procter & Gamble.

So the U.S. Conference of Mayors proposes that 1,100 American cities investigate the "environmental impact" of discarded water bottles -- and encourage consumers to drink good, old-fashioned municipal tap water.

The city of Chicago has imposed a 5-cent tax on each new plastic bottle of water, hoping to discourage consumption. San Francisco banned purchases of both single-use and water-cooler bottles last year, and New York's Suffolk County may do the same.

But the municipalities themselves don't get rave reviews from environmentalists.

"Sometimes tap water does not taste good or smell good," says Dr. Mayer. "There's a deep-seated fear that you can't trust that."

That's what drove consumers, initially, to embrace bottled water, even though much of it is simply reprocessed tap water.

"I grew up in San Diego drinking water from the Colorado River" says Dr. Mayer. "It definitely had a taste to it."

"In some places in Texas, there are so many minerals in the water that you can almost chew them," says Van Newenhizen, though he adds that "municipal water supplies in this country are very highly regulated. It's safe water."

Still, America's water infrastructure is aging, and some fear it's endangering quality and health.

"When water travels through corroded pipelines, it picks up contaminants, such as sediment, lead and microbial cysts," says McKinley.

Arsenic contamination is also a concern in some areas of the U.S. where it's found naturally in the soil.

"That's one reason that municipalities are adding even more chlorine to the water," says Gleick. "They want to make sure it kills the contaminants in the old pipes."

The U.S. Conference of Mayors notes that America already spends $43 billion a year to clean its tap water, and the U.S. Senate is moving forward with legislation to upgrade the infrastructure.

"I can understand the psychology of people worrying about putting drinking water from the tap into their bodies," says Dr. Mayer.

One solution may be so-called point-of-use water coolers. They're much like the coolers office workers have stood around for generations. But instead of being replenished by five-gallon jugs brought in on a truck, they're connected directly to a tap with water from the local town.

Fitted with filters that can remove chlorine and other chemicals and minerals, the point-of-use coolers may be the next big thing in water consumption.

"It's somewhat akin to putting the treatment filter under the kitchen sink," says Culligan's Van Newenhizen. "But it has more -- you can have a chiller tank. So you can drink chilled water. Also, you can have a hot-water tank, and can make instant coffee or ramen noodles."

A number of firms offer this kind of green technology. Other than Culligan and Water Logic, they include Source H20, which offers "filtered water, but no bottle," as well as Everpure and Aquaverve, which sells water coolers made from stainless steel rather than plastic.

These coolers "reduce your carbon footprint, decrease contribution to landfills, reduce energy consumption," claims Water Logic International. They also "reduce dependence on oil and oil-derived products, and are an efficient, hygienic and unlimited water source."

They also don't have the old 5-gallon plastic jugs on top, familiar to anyone who's had to replace one by himself. After 90 or so uses, those jugs get stinky and have to be discarded -- and that means more PETE for the recycling heap.

Starting at about $40 a month for rentals, point-of-use water-coolers aren't cheap. And consumers have to be cautious when asking about their options for point-of-use water coolers.

"Water treatment companies might say that no water is safe without their equipment installed," says Tom Cartwright, CEO of PureOFlow, a maker of reverse-osmosis filters.

There are other environmental concerns. What about the filters from the point-of-use water cooler makers? Are they being recycled?

That's a question that bothers a lot of scientists.

"There are studies that need to be done about how consumers dispose of filters and how often they do so," says Dr. Mayer. "At this point, we just don't know."

And green groups aren't rushing out to endorse point-of-use water coolers.

"There is concern about the plastic and materials used in making those coolers," says Gleick. "There could be leaching. But there needs to be science done on that."

Given all those facts, how green are these newfangled, high-tech water coolers?

They're greener than bottled water, that's for sure, whether it's of the single-use or the reusable 5-gallon-jug variety.

The newer technologies promise to keep plastic out of landfills, and plastic particulate, leaching from large and small bottles alike, out of the mouths of consumers.

MORE REASONS TO LET US DELIVER LOCAL, ORGANIC FOODS TO YOUR HOME OR RESTAURANT...

Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird?

Though a consumer may not be able to tell the difference, a striking red and blue Thomas the Tank Engine made in Wisconsin is not the same as one manufactured in China -- the paint on the Chinese twin may contain dangerous levels of lead. In the same way, a plump red tomato from Florida is often not the same as one grown in Mexico. The imported fruits and vegetables found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States.

In this case, the victims are North American songbirds. Bobolinks, called skunk blackbirds in some places, were once a common sight in the Eastern United States. In mating season, the male in his handsome tuxedo-like suit sings deliriously as he whirrs madly over the hayfields. Bobolink numbers have plummeted almost 50 percent in the last four decades, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

The birds are being poisoned on their wintering grounds by highly toxic pesticides. Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, captured bobolinks feeding in rice fields in Bolivia and took samples of their blood to test for pesticide exposure. She found that about half of the birds had drastically reduced levels of cholinesterase, an enzyme that affects brain and nerve cells -- a sign of exposure to toxic chemicals.

Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe. Rice farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned in the United States. In countries like Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador, researchers have found that farmers spray their crops heavily and repeatedly with a chemical cocktail of dangerous pesticides.

In the mid-1990s, American biologists used satellite tracking to follow Swainson's hawks to their wintering grounds in Argentina, where thousands of them were found dead from monocrotophos poisoning. Migratory songbirds like bobolinks, barn swallows and Eastern kingbirds are suffering mysterious population declines, and pesticides may well be to blame. A single application of a highly toxic pesticide to a field can kill seven to 25 songbirds per acre. About half the birds that researchers capture after such spraying are found to suffer from severely depressed neurological function.

Migratory birds, modern-day canaries in the coal mine, reveal an environmental problem hidden to consumers. Testing by the United States Food and Drug Administration shows that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three times as likely to violate Environmental Protection Agency standards for pesticide residues as the same foods grown in the United States. Some but not all pesticide residues can be removed by washing or peeling produce, but tests by the Centers for Disease Control show that most Americans carry traces of pesticides in their blood. American consumers can discourage this poisoning by avoiding foods that are bad for the environment, bad for farmers in Latin America and, in the worst cases, bad for their own families.

What should you put on your bird-friendly grocery list? Organic coffee, for one thing. Most mass-produced coffee is grown in open fields heavily treated with fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. In contrast, traditional small coffee farmers grow their beans under a canopy of tropical trees, which provide shade and essential nitrogen, and fertilize their soil naturally with leaf litter. Their organic, fair-trade coffee is now available in many coffee shops and supermarkets, and it is recommended by the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

Organic bananas should also be on your list. Bananas are typically grown with one of the highest pesticide loads of any tropical crop. Although bananas present little risk of pesticide ingestion to the consumer, the environment where they are grown is heavily contaminated.

When it comes to nontraditional Latin American crops like melons, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers and strawberries, it can be difficult to find any that are organically grown. We should buy these foods only if they are not imported from Latin America.

Now that spring is here, we take it for granted that the birds' cheerful songs will fill the air when our apple trees blossom. But each year, as we continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, we ensure that fewer and fewer songbirds will return.

Bridget Stutchbury, a professor of biology at York University in Toronto, is the author of "Silence of the Songbirds."