ModeShift - Part 2

Jason Rowntree’s Cattle Grazing Practices Enhance Water and Environmental Quality

by Keith SchneiderAugust 16, 2024August 16, 20240

LAKE CITY, MI – Two facts about Michigan agriculture are scarcely recognized outside the fences and beyond the drainage ditches of the state’s 45,000 farms. The first: farming is among the most technologically sophisticated industrial sectors in Michigan and every other state. Second: livestock farms are the state’s largest source of water pollution from toxic nitrates and phosphorus, and air pollution from methane, a powerful climate change gas. Here on Michigan State University’s 1,100-acre livestock …

Movement To Limit CAFO Pollution Emboldened By Michigan Court Ruling

by Keith SchneiderAugust 15, 2024August 15, 20240

A recent state court decision has the potential to significantly transform how animal agriculture is regulated in Michigan and could influence how other states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency oversee the industry’s mammoth waste stream, said environmental lawyers and activists. On July 31 , in a case that pit the administration of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer against the state’s Farm Bureau, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that he Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and …

Breaking Through Big Ag’s Shroud of Resistance to Environmental Protection, Michigan Supreme Court Sets Stage For Curbing Mammoth Tide of Farm Waste

by Keith SchneiderAugust 2, 2024August 2, 20240

In a rare rebuke to the industrial farm sector, the Michigan Supreme Court this week ruled that state environmental regulators have full authority to require big livestock and poultry operations to improve their handling of billions of pounds of manure that contributes to serious contamination of state waters. The 5-2 decision issued Wednesday is one of the most significant environmental protection measures in Michigan in years. It comes after four years of battles between state …

Platte River Park, A Natural Resource Treasure, Opens in Benzie County

by Keith SchneiderMay 21, 2024May 30, 20240

HONOR, Michigan — From the place where it slips out of Lake Ann in Benzie County’s northeast corner, Platte River haunts a landscape of forest and open fields, steals past this village of 330 residents, crosses a mighty and silent wetland, fills a big lake, and then, nearly 30 miles from where it started, reaches a curved sand inlet where it empties into Lake Michigan. One of the 49 blue ribbon trout streams in Michigan’s …

CommonGrounds Community-Owned Cooperative Building Project in Traverse City, Michigan

by Keith SchneiderMay 14, 2024May 21, 20240

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – As owner of Higher Grounds Trading Company, Chris Treter enjoyed strong demand for his company’s coffee even as he confronted a related challenge brought on by the surging popularity of this Lake Michigan city. New hires couldn’t find affordable places to live. “Traverse City is becoming Myrtle Beach meets Hilton Head,” said Mr. Treter. “A place catering to a population outside the region. Our workforce can’t live here anymore.” Treter’s solution, …

Jo-Anne Rosalyn Schneider’s Sparkling Life

by Keith SchneiderApril 22, 2024May 30, 20247

Of all the facets that God and heritage cut into the diamond that was Jo-Anne Schneider’s stylish life, the one I always found memorably amusing was her quick, unreserved assessment of everything. I call them Joanyisms. Years ago, for example, I bought an old farmstead in the forest of northern Michigan, close to the Great Lake. It was a place to spend summers and eventually to establish a home in what I considered a glorious …

Conservation Programs Cost $Tens of Billions But Farm Nutrient Pollution Gets Worse

by Keith SchneiderApril 18, 2024April 22, 20240

VENICE, LA. — Kindra Arnesen is a 46-year-old Louisiana fishing boat operator who spent most of her life among the pelicans and bayous 20 miles upstream from where the Mississippi River ends at the Pass A Loutre State Wildlife Management Area on the Gulf of Mexico. Clark Porter is a 62-year-old farmer who lives close to Reinbeck, Iowa where he spends one part of his day as an environmental specialist for the Iowa Department of …

New Report Sparks Questions and Controversy Over Possible Causes for Iowa “Cancer Crisis”

by Keith SchneiderMarch 5, 2024March 13, 20240

Amid increasing scrutiny of a potential link between Iowa farm chemicals and cancer, a new report is generating controversy as it blames rising cancer rates not on the toxins used widely throughout the state, but on something else entirely: binge alcohol consumption. The Iowa Cancer Registry, a health research group housed at the University of Iowa, reported on February 20 that Iowa has the second-highest and fastest-rising incidence of cancer among all states. An estimated 21,000 new …

“Best Management Practices” Aren’t Best and Don’t Work to Curb Farm Nutrient Contamination

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 8, 2024February 17, 20240

America’s immense, productive, polluting, and disease-generating farm sector is a big target for reform and improvement. It has been every year since Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture during the Nixon administration counseled farmers to “plant fence row to fence row,” and “get big or get out.” Congress complied with changes in farm policy that encouraged payment of subsidies for field crops that eventually were uncapped, promoted ethanol from corn as a substitute for gasoline, …

Cancer-Related Disease and Deaths Spur Actions to Fight Farm Chemical Contamination in Corn Belt

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 31, 2024January 31, 20240

When directors of the public water utility in Des Moines, Iowa, went to court in 2015 to try to stop toxic farm nutrients from contaminating the city’s drinking water, they knew the federal lawsuit they filed would be seen as not just a desperate step to protect public health, but also a brazen act of defiance that would provoke a ferocious response from Iowa’s powerful farm and political leadership. As they anticipated, a cohort of agricultural interests …