The Good, the Bad and the Moderately Ugly.

The media today covers a wide variety of topics in many fashions. Now that there is the availability of the Internet, the media today has been revolutionized. But with all this revolutionizing, how far will things go? In with the good comes the bad, right? Wrong.
Journalism today still has its ethics and moral codes to uphold now more than ever. Unfortunately, as a society, we must put our b.s. ears on and figure out right from wrong by ourselves. As news coverage comes to us at all times of the day, this also means more coverage too, right? Also wrong.
We as consumers demand stories that will entertain us, scare us, inform us and give us those warm and fuzzy feelings at the end of the day. Which can, in result, lead to important news out of the picture. In the instance that I am talking about is the latest talk about the Farm Bill. We are getting an influx of all negative aspects of the bill, but none of the positive. Especially, what it can do to California’s agriculture.
Sure, it is over budget and yes our one and only president vetoed it. That doesn’t make it bad, though. The Farm Bill began in the 1930’s as a result of the great depression. Consequently, due to the depression, 75% of the current Farm Bill supports and funds nutrition programs, such as food stamps and the like. The politics come to play on the commodity side of things: such as corn, wheat, cotton and soybeans.
Here is the good, bad and the moderately ugly. The ugly is that not much reformation has taken place on the farm bill since its origins in the 1930’s and not much is changing now. The bad is that this current bill will let corporate agribusiness deepen its roots, so to speak. Finally the good, there is a lot of good…
The revisions that have been made are victories for sustainable agriculture, nutrition and conservation. Woo hoo! More specifically the bill gives 5 million annual funding to community food projects. It supports local food initiatives by funding new local and regional food supply networks. It is tightening the USDA’s oversight of genetically modified organisms, more commonly known as GMO. It is given ranchers and farmers protection with livestock titles. The bill is supporting diversity initiatives by giving advantages to minority and socially disadvantaged farmers. 75 million is assisting new farmers and ranchers. Implementation of COOL or country of origin labels are now required. Lastly, 78 million is going to organic agriculture research and support.
Not bad for a bill that is getting negative representation. Did I forget to mention that it is also assisting specialty crop farmers, which means California baby! All in all I believe that media coverage today is well versed in all topics, but agriculture is not necessarily the “hot topic.” I believe that it’s a hard topic to cover without people zoning out. So no more skipping out on hearing about agriculture, it might affect you.
Author: Erica Davis
Word Count: 506