In July 2006, DEFRA launched a consultation on its measures to regulate how GM crops can 'coexist' with conventional and organic crops and who should pay when farmers suffer economic damage caused by GM contamination. DEFRA says it will await the results of 'important' further research and has promised to commission new research in the light of overwhelming public concern. Friends of the Earth said the Government must now listen to public calls for much stricter 'co-existence' rules,...

Business is up and down, as the farming trade tends to be, and he is always on the lookout for a new crop. Hemp, a strait-laced cousin of marijuana, is an ingredient in products from fabric and food to carpet backing and car door panels. To clear up the popular confusion about the properties of what is sometimes called industrial hemp, the crop's prospective purveyors explain that hemp and smokable marijuana share a genus and a species but are about as similar as rope and dope. Farmers in...

Hettinger enjoys working at the beet dump, though the 12-hour days get long, and she works in all kinds of weather, good and bad. Andres Martinez controls the conveyor system, making sure the beets get up a chute, past the screen that separates the beets from rocks, sand, mud and beet tops, and on to the conveyor on the piler arm. The drivers then pull forward and wait their turn to dump their sugar-beet loads onto a conveyor system on the beet dump piling machine. At first glance, it...

While Nancy Pelosi was embezzling 24 billion tax payer dollars from the US Treasury to bribe Democrats in the House into supporting her Iraq Surrender bill, liberals in California were introducing legislation to ban inexpensive incandescent light bulbs in favor of compact florescent lamps which require 1/4 the power and cost 10 times more. While Nancy Pelosi was embezzling 24 billion tax payer dollars from the US Treasury to bribe Democrats in the House into supporting her Iraq Surrender...

The revelation that farmers lose more billions a year to crime comes as two North West families battle to come to terms with attacks on their homesteads last week. Farmers are facing a multi-billion rand crisis as criminals plunder their land, homes and stock. Interventions should include re-establishing trust between police and the farming community and prioritising policing in rural areas with proper resources being allocated to fight crime, he said. He said small-time farmers in...