A seed grower from the Willamette Valley, along with other plaintiffs, has successfully sued the USDA and APHIS for failure to require an environmental impact statement prior to deregulation of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready sugar beet plants. Deregulation opened the door for transgenic sugar beet production in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world. The judge ordered that an environmental impact statement be conducted because USDA/APHIS failed to adequately consider the impact on the environment from stated cross contamination concerns, and the socio-economic impacts on consumers (eaters), farmers, and other market participants over the question of the continued availability of non-transgenic sugar beet crops. Check out the ‘Cooking Up a Story’ video interview with Frank Morton, conducted earlier this year before the ruling.

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In my previous post about the Bald Hill store closure, I mentioned that there is a 299-page staff report on the violation and the farm’s appeal. The site that hosted that document was not easy to navigate, so I turned the entire document into a PDF. It can be accessed here on my site until the public hearing on the 7th. There’s a good discussion about this taking place over at the We Love Corvallis blog, and there are comments on the Gazette Times story as well. This issue has potential ramifications beyond the farm store itself, I would think. Yes, it would be supremely disappointing to lose the store — which consists of a couple of freezers, by the way, it is certainly not anything close to a grocery store — but Bald Hill Farm is steward to hundreds of acres of land in Corvallis. There’s the realignment...

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