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Approximately 68% of the world’s agricultural lands (eight billion acres as compared to four billion acres of croplands) are used for grazing. The majority of these landscapes are unsuitable for raising food crops.

These rangelands and pasturelands are home to over a billion people who are dependent on the livestock that graze on these lands for their living. These landscapes are often some of the most degraded lands on the planet due to deforestation, erosion, drought, and inappropriate grazing practices.

The good news is that there are a range of grazing systems that can regenerate degraded ecosystems, sequester carbon, increase ground cover, biodiversity, soil organic matter, water holding capacity, and raise the income of several hundred million small farmers and herders. 

Find out more: Regenerative Grazing – Increased Production, Biodiversity Resilience, Profits and a Climate Change Solution

Award-winning USA Today journalist Alison Young has been exposing the dangers of creating virulent and highly transmissible viruses and bacteria in unregulated and accident-prone labs across the US, China, and other nations for over a decade, calling attention to over 100 lab accidents every year in the US alone between 2014-2019. 

Young writes:

“As members of a World Health Organization expert team have made international headlines recently dismissing as “extremely unlikely” the possibility that a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, could have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t stop thinking of the hundreds of lab accidents that are secretly occurring just in the United States.

“As an investigative reporter, I have spent more than a decade revealing shocking safety breaches that officials at laboratories in our own country don’t want the public to know about…

“The notion that more than 2.7 million deaths worldwide – so far – could be the result of a lab accident has been met with skepticism and derision by many journalists and scientists who often portray it as a crackpot conspiracy theory fueled by former President Donald Trump’s China-bashing rhetoric. Without question, the lab-leak theory has been politically and racially weaponized in ugly ways. Nonetheless, that rhetoric needs to be separated from legitimate questions about lab safety that are deserving of investigation.

“Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about getting to the truth. But those who dare seek answers to reasonable questions about any lab accidents in Wuhan are accused of peddling conspiracies.”  

Read more: Could an Accident Have Caused COVID-19? Why the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Shouldn’t Be Dismissed

A California district court judge has ruled that hydroponic fruits, vegetables, and crops, grown in containers rather than soil, can continue to be labeled and marketed as “USDA Organic,” despite widespread complaints from organic consumers and farmers. 

The Center for Food Safety, who filed a lawsuit along with a number of organic farms and organizations to stop hydroponic foods from being labeled as “USDA Organic,” commented on this highly unpopular court decision: 

“Under the Court’s ruling, hydroponic producers can sell their crops as organic without building soil fertility, yet organic farmers growing food in soil have to meet various soil-building requirements to be certified organic,” said Sylvia Wu, senior attorney with Center for Food Safety and counsel for plaintiffs. “This double standard violates the very purpose of the organic label and is contrary to the federal organic act. We are analyzing all our legal options and will continue to work hard to defend the meaning of the organic label.”

OCA and our allies urge consumers and farmers to continue to pressure the Biden Administration and the USDA to stop the corporate agribusiness “capture” of National Organic Program standards, which currently allow factory-farmed poultry, eggs, and dairy, as well as soil-less hydroponics, to display the “USDA Organic” label, unfairly penalizing the overwhelming majority of organic farmers and brands who uphold organic integrity.

Read more: Court Rules Soil-less Hydroponics Allowed Under Organic Standards, Organic Farmers/Consumers Say No

Read more: We Fought the Law, and the Law Won