I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Factory farms in Michigan now produce as much waste as 60 million people, according to data released today by the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch. According to the group’s analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture Census data the average size of an industrial egg-laying operation in Michigan nearly tripled to more than 875,000 [...]
The “business model” approach to government unveiled by Governor-elect Rick Snyder yesterday puts former Dept. of Agriculture director Dan Wyant — an opponent regulating the negative environmental effects of large farms — in charge of the Dept. of Environmental Quality.
The demand for food aid in Metro Detroit is outstripping supply. Soup kitchens are rationing portions and food banks are learning to stock peanut butter, crackers and juice as emergency nutrition for people who show up too weak to wait in line for groceries. Yesterday we noted a Michigan State University study that found that [...]
People who want to try to make ends meet by selling food that they make at home may now do so legally, as long as they stick to baked goods, jams and jellies. A Cottage Food Bill enacted this year allows people to set up small scale food vending operations without the expense of renting [...]
The U.S. Food and Drug administration is charging Scenic View Diary of Hamilton, Michigan with selling dairy cows that contain unsafe levels of illegally administered antibiotics. In a Aug. 31 complaint filed in Grand Rapids federal court the U.S. Dept. of Justice charges that despite numerous warnings over the last eight years the dairy has [...]
If Michigan farms supplied all of the fruits and vegetables that people eat here during the growing season around 4,000 jobs would be created, according to a new study commissioned by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. Patty Cantrell, senior policy analyst at the Michigan Land Use Institute writes that the [...]
A recent study found that eating meat or vegetables grown in the dioxin-contaminated floodplains around Saginaw causes high dioxin levels in the blood, but few people in the area know that and neither Dow nor the government seems to be taking any steps to inform the public.
A Dow Chemical-funded study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan has found that consumption of food grown in the dioxin-contaminated Tittabawassee floodplain resulted in a toxic burden in the bodies of some local residents.
The Michigan Farm Bureau announced yesterday that it supports maintaining adequate funding and staffing for the Dept. of Agriculture program that conducts inspections of housing provided to migrant and seasonal farm workers. The group warned that just four staff members are now responsible for inspecting housing units used by 22,000 workers. The announcement came in [...]
Gov. Jennifer Granholm is facing opposition to her Oct. 8 executive order that restructures government by combining the departments of Natural Resources and Environmental Quality. The order also removed the power of the Agriculture Commission and the Natural Resources Commission to appoint the directors of their departments. The move was presented as a way to save money but farmers, sportsmen and conservationists say they are worried that it will improperly concentrate power in the governor’s office.
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