Two Positions American Farmland Trust: National Women for the Land and Illinois

AFT is seeking a strong and collaborative leader to lead and expand its Women for the Land Initiative throughout the country.  They launched this national initiative in early 201 with a strategy  to: (1) conduct research to help us understand this audience and identify the barriers they face, (2) engage women landowners to learn more, […]

Whole-Farm Revenue Protection is Here

Hey check out USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) Whole Farm Revenue Protection (WFRP) crop insurance program which is now available in all states in the lower 48 for the 2016 crop year. The policy allows producers to insure between 50 to 85 percent of their whole farm revenue and makes crop insurance more affordable for […]

Symposium on American Food Resilience (Part 1) released

Part 1 of the Symposium on American Food Resilience (13 articles) has now been published in the September issue of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (http://link.springer.com/journal/13412/5/3/page/1#page-1).  Part 2 (14 articles) will be in the December issue. The entire collection is exciting in the diversity of its coverage, as experts on various aspects of […]

Tom Vilsack at UIUC September 10th

Start getting your questions ready. On September 10th, our Department of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences will welcome Tom Vilsack to speak on “The role of public research universities in addressing international food security.” We’d like to encourage folks to turn out for this event – and come prepared with some challenging questions. While over […]

Avian Influences: The Politics of the Mid-West Bird Flu Outbreak

Robert Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and social epidemiologist, and co-author of the groundbreaking Farming Human Pathogens (2009). In a recent blog post he addresses the recent – and ongoing – outbreak of avian influenza in the US. In this short essay he dissects the public discussion and institutional response to the outbreak, and lays […]