Big Oil is getting into the biodiesel game. On the surface that’s good news. Last week I wrote about oil companies and how through their gas station franchises they are not allowing competing products like biodiesel to arrive on the pumps. Now Conoco-Phillips has entered into an agreement with Tyson Foods to produce the oil company's own brand of biodiesel out of leftover, well, parts from Tyson’s chicken, beef, and pork production.

Liberal, Kansas, 14 April 1935. (Kansas State Historical Society)

Black Sunday April 14, 1935. The dust storm that turned day into night. Many believed the world was coming to an end.

Those photos and captions are from the site of the USDA Wind Erosion Research Unit (WERU), in cooperation with Kansas State University.

The story is movingly told in images, text and podcasts at Wessel's Living History Farm. They credit the term "dust bowl" to a reporter with the Associated Press.

Any idea who it was who wrote this?

"Three little words achingly familiar on the Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains."

It won't be a moment too soon if you ask Renegade Lunch Lady Chef Ann Cooper, with whom I had the pleasure of appearing at a farm bill "teach in" hosted by Michael Pollan at Berkeley a few weeks back.

From today's Washington Post:

As part of a sweeping effort to help improve nutrition for schoolchildren and fight childhood obesity, the Agriculture Department is proposing for the first time to require schools to bring their cafeteria menus into compliance with the latest U.S. dietary guidelines.

While the USDA has limited the sale of soda and some junk foods in school cafeterias, it has not required schools to implement the 2005 Dietary Guidelines, which call for increased consumption of whole grains, fruit and vegetables. Nor does it regulate vending machines, a la carte menus, or other food and beverages sold in schools outside the cafeteria, although a bill introduced by Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) seeks to have it do that.

This development should also be read as an indication of the increased role fruit and vegetable growers are playing in this year's farm bill debate, starting with their clear influence on the Bush administration's farm bill proposal and Rep. Dennis Cardoza's EAT Healthy America legislation.

The key question is the one CSPI's Margo Wootan raises in the story:

The USDA proposes to spend $500 million in new, mandatory funding over the next 10 years for the purchase of additional fresh fruit and vegetables in school lunch and breakfast programs. The department also wants to shift $2.75 billion over the next 10 years to increase purchases of fruit and vegetables through its commodity programs -- a move that some said has little chance of success given the strong political forces likely to oppose such a change.

"Is Congress and the USDA going to have the political will to shift commodity purchases away from foods that children should eat less of, like meat, to fruit and vegetables, which children should eat more of?" asked Wootan. "The answer is that it will be very difficult."

Yet another example of why ChewsWise is such a terrific source of news and commentary on organic food, farming and related matters. Sam Fromartz actually breaks the story on Salon, but here's the gist:

Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture quietly released a ruling that alarmed organic certifiers and groups who work with third-world farmers. The decision tightens organic certification requirements to such a degree that it could sharply curtail the ability of small grower co-ops to produce organic coffee -- not to mention organic bananas, cocoa, sugar and even spices.

The tightening consists of farm-by-farm organic certification inspections replacing a system that allowed multiple farms participating in a co-op system to be certified at once. So inspection costs for small farms in developing countries will increase dramatically, forcing some to drop organic, no doubt, while larger operations that can afford inspections will expand their share of organic.

Not that we couldn't use more vigilance on inspections...

The new USDA certification ruling arose out of a case involving an unnamed Mexican grower group that failed to detect a farmer using a prohibited insecticide and prevent empty fertilizer bags being used for crop storage -- both of which violate USDA organic regulations.

I've had organic farmers here, where the inspection/certfication ratio is considerably higher, tell me they feel there is a double standard that tilts against them versus importers. Of course, domestic conventional growers often raise the same concerns about tighter pesticide rules here versus abroad.

But Fromartz's story emphasizes the viewpoint that the corrective action by USDA's National Organic Program is too severe and too abrupt. A middle ground stance--punishing the violators not the entire system and phasing in higher inspection rates--could have sent the same signal without such wholesale economic damage to small organic farms in the developing world.

The NYC Farm Bill Workgroup is in the house.

NYC Farm Bill Workgroup is effort to provide a unified voice for a better Farm Bill that meets the needs of New York City.

What do they want? A farm bill that works for New York.

What--you got a problem with that?

It's another sign of the times in the national media's ongoing free fall, but in this case the development bodes very ill for agriculture policy: the Associated Press has transferred its reporter on the USDA beat to the Republican race for the presidency and has no plans to replace her. Libby Quaid broke the news to me as she was finishing her reporting on this terrific story (in full below the fold). It could be the last story filed with an Associated Press byline from USDA.

Quaid is the most recent in a long and distinguished line of journalists on the national ag beat. In my 30 years working on agriculture policy and farm bills, I can't remember a time when AP did not have a reporter based out of USDA. (Does anyone know just how long AP had a USDA beat?)

In the near term, AP's going AWOL from the department will significantly impoverish media coverage of the impending farm bill debate. It is very difficult for overstretched Washington-based AP reporters covering congressional delegations or other topics to stay abreast of agriculture policy or USDA administrative developments. State-based AP reporters usually have their hands full, too, making it almost impossible to budget time for reporting and writing stories on agriculture topics that, let's face it, are obscure to much of the world and most journalists.

Many agriculture journalists have lamented to me that their ranks are steadily shrinking. News staffs are downsizing and consolidating beats, and ag is often a loser in those reshufflings. Specialty farm publications face declining ad revenue in competition from the Web. And when so few general interest publications have a significant farm or ranch audience, editors have increasingly questioned not just the idea of an ag beat, but the value of assigning any spot ag stories, features or investigations at all.

I would have expected AP to hang on at USDA and fill coverage holes created by ag beat attrition in both DC bureaus and regional outlets, a pattern we've see across many beats and media outlets in this age of consolidation and Web competition.

Instead, the exit of AP from the national farm policy scene may mark the highest-profile downgrading of ag journalism yet.

More like "No Organic".

The latest USDA figures (see Table 3) for certified organic acreage, from 2005, report 130,000 acres planted.

Hard telling what the acreage will be in 2007, but let's assume, rather wildly given the trend line, that organic corn has doubled in just two years, to 260,000 acres.

If USDA's March 30 planting intentions estimate comes to pass and we see an ethanol-driven 90,500,000 acres of corn in the ground this spring (12 million acres more than 2006), that would mean less than three-tenths of one percent of US corn production is organic.

I'm betting organic's share of corn is even lower than that. Then again, organic comprises only 0.5 percent of the roughly 800 million acres used to produce crops and livestock in this country. Organic needs to grow in the right way--and here's some encouraging news on that point from ChewsWise.

"Organic," Dr. Phil Landrigan once remarked, "is private school for food." It's great if you find it; great if you can afford it. But for all its cultural salience, in the grand scheme of U.S. agriculture's impacts on environment and public health, organic farming at its current scale is still making a trivial contribution after all these years. It most certainly does need to grow--a lot--to begin making a difference on the scale of landscapes and populations.

EWG's ambition for the 2007 farm bill is to kick it up a notch. I talked about this (starting about minute 50) at the recent event at Berkeley hosted by Michael Pollan.