Friday News Roundup 3/5/10

A weekly roundup of news and events concerning food, farms, the environment, local communities- and anything else that may catch our eye.

On Monday, the Washington Post and the LA Times both ran articles discussing the role of manure in the clean water and energy debates happening across the country.

The 2010 Commodity Classic started yesterday in Anaheim, CA with a jam packed agenda including sessions on soil health and how farmers can better utilize social media.

The final round of Change.org’s “Ideas for Change in America” has started with our idea “No Farms No Food | Save the Land that Sustains Us” currently in second place.  Don’t forget to vote!

The USDA announced that a general signup in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) will be held later this year and that an additional 300,000 acres has been approved for conservation programs under the CRP.

Francis Beinecke penned an article for Switchboard regarding Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s remarks about the common ground between farmers and environmentalists: “After all, he said, “We all kind of want the same thing.”

And for all those that missed it, the USDA Economic Research Service released a Food Environment Atlas last month to “get a spatial overview of a community’s ability to access healthy food and its success in doing so.”