HEADS UP & WATCH OUT! UNLABELED GMO-SALMON HEADED OUR WAY NEXT FALL. One company has now obtained voluntary 'Non-GMO-Labeling' for its farm-raised Salmon in order to differentiate it from the soon-to-appear dishonest UNLABELED gene-spliced Salmon from dubious competitor 'AquaBounty.'
Here's the fact: that fake-o GMO Salmon isn't real Salmon at all: it's freak-fish gene-spliced with an eel.
So be careful and hold tight onto your wallet beginning Fall 2020 when Faux GMO Salmon is scheduled to come to stores and restaurants.
It wouldn't hurt to explain to your local supermarket Fish Manager that you will be taking your business elsewhere unless she promises to BAN THE GMO Salmon from her store. Jim

"The move by Superior Fresh comes as production of the first GMO Salmon by AquaBounty Technologies, Inc is underway in a grow-out facility in Indiana. AquaBounty plans to harvest the first GMO salmon from the Indiana facility in the fall of 2020, then market the fish to supermarkets but not with a consumer-facing label indicating it is genetically engineered.

"The company's AquAdvantage Salmon is genetically engineered with a Chinook salmon growth hormone gene and an antifreeze gene from an eel-like fish called the ocean pout…"

Organic aquaponics co. obtains non-GMO label for farmed salmon – Sustainable Food News

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BREAKING NEWS! NEW FILM 'MODIFIED' NOW HAS DIGITAL RELEASE. Filmmaker Aube Giroux's powerful award-winning film 'Modified' was released today in digital format today.
Click on the image below to view the full-length film. This second link will allow you to view the Official Trailer (2:34). Jim https://vimeo.com/ondemand/modified

"'Modified' follows a very personal and poignant mother-daughter journey into the world of GMOs. Filmed over 10 years and anchored in the filmmaker’s relationship to her mother (a gardener and food activist who battled cancer during the film’s production), the film asks why GMOs are not labeled on foods in the United States and Canada, despite being labeled in 64 countries around the world.The film has been featured at over 70 international film festivals and received 15 awards since its release, including the prestigious 2019 James Beard Award for Best Documentary Film. World-renowned chef Jacques Pépin calls it 'an enlightening and powerful documentary!'"

Modified GMO film

Modified is a documentary film that asks why GMOs are not labeled in Canada and the United States despite being labeled in 64 countries around the world.


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CLIMATE CRISIS DISPATCH: NORTH DAKOTA POTATO FARMERS GET BEAT UP BY MONSOON FALL RAINS WHICH PREVENTED HARVEST OF NOW FROST-RUINED POTATOES. A relentless wet Fall is a potato farmer's worst nightmare. In 2019 the Upper Midwest got hammered with excessive rains concentrated during the harvest months of September & October.
Northern Maine – where our Wood Prairie Family Farm (www.woodprairie.organic) is located – was declared a Federal Disaster area in both 2011 and 2013 thanks to excessive rains throughout the growing season.
This new troubling report comes from the traditional potato Mecca of the Red River Valley with potatoes grown in both ND and Minnesota. Caleb, Megan & Jim

"Sander Dagen raised an exceptional seed potato crop this year. That makes it sting even more as he is forced to abandon approximately 80% of his acres because he cannot harvest them.

"'You spend a year planning this out,' Dagen said. 'To have to destroy them is a little bit sad for sure.'

"The Karlstad farmer, like other seed potato farmers in the Red River Valley, had to abandon acres because wet weather delayed the harvest for several weeks. After rains and snow, freezing temperatures destroyed the crop.

"Dagen’s family, who have grown seed potatoes for 101 years, have lost acres to heavy summer rains that drowned out the crop, but never such a large amount during harvest, he said. Dagen individually lost 69 of his 85 seed potato acres. Overall, Dagen, his brother Brooks and their father Justin lost about one-third of their collective 400 acres…

"'The growers that were in the Red River Valley are the ones that are impacted the most,' Byre said.

"Seed potato acreage near Stephen, Minn., for example, wasn’t harvested at all, and a farmer near Nielsville, Minn., harvested only one-third of his acres, Byre said."

US: Thousands of seed potato acres in the Red River Valley will go to waste

Sander Dagen raised an exceptional seed potato crop this year. That makes it sting even more as he is forced to abandon approximately 80% of his acres because he cannot harvest them. “You spend a y…


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A VISUAL SNAPSHOT OF WHAT PLAGUES AMERICAN DAIRY FARMERS. Most of the price people pay for milk goes to Middlemen leaving both consumers and farmers are left far behind.
The American Dairy sector is now composed of two parts. In States like Maine and Vermont, 25% of Dairy farmers are now Certified…

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DON'T MISS THIS BEAUTIFUL BIRD'S-EYE'S-VIEW OF NORTHERN MAINE. Spectacular footage (3:28) – filmed last month – beginning with Aroostook County farmland and ending with Katahdin and the Penobscot River.
The potato harvest portion features the Staples' family farm in Presque Isle who grow eight different varieties of Certified Seed Potatoes. They use a Lockwood 4-Row Windrower to consolidate the crop ahead of their Lockwood Air-Harvester, digging 10-rows per pass.
One-fifth of the Maine potato crop is grown as Certified Seed. We grow twenty varieties of Organic Certified Seed Potatoes making them available Sept-July 4 to customers in all 50 States via our Wood Prairie Mail Order Catalog and Webstore (www.woodprairie.organic). Caleb, Megan & Jim

Northern Maine, From Above | Assignment: Maine

See the dazzling colors & gorgeous scenery of Aroostook and northern Penobscot counties.


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ELEPHANTS HIGHLIGHT MAINE CIRCUS PARADE. Bath, Maine. Circa 1890. A large crowd gathered on Center Street in Bath watches a parade featuring exotic Elephants. Caleb, Megan & Jim

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HOW DOES ONE SOLVE OUR GROWING HOT-ECONOMY-DILEMMA: WORKING AMERICANS WHO CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE WHERE THEY WORK? Increasingly, hard-working Americans can't find affordable housing in the country's economic hot spots.
Meanwhile, rural America has its own set of challenges: flattened economies thanks to the undervaluing of raw material production, low wages and jaw-dropping house BARGAINS as historical patterns of depopulation continue.
As a percent of income, housing options in strong-economy-engines like Coastal California are high and increasing unaffordable. This dire situation is creating a new class of the working homeless.
What do we do about it? The 'Rolling Stone' reports. Jim

"The city of San Jose opened the parking lot to homeless families after fielding hundreds of complaints from locals confounded by the increasing number of people they saw living out of their cars on city streets in the past two years…

"It’s just a patch of concrete adjacent to a community center where the kids can shower and do their homework, with a caseworker on site for a few hours every night, and a rent-a-cop security guard who occasionally cruises by to keep an eye on things. But Amador says her family feels safer here than on the street by themselves.

"Every night at 7 p.m., she and her husband pull their two cars into the lot — the Explorer and an Econoline van sold to them by another homeless family. They pack their belongings under a tarp on the roof, lay the seats down, and go to sleep, waking up at the crack of dawn to repack the car so they can be off the lot by 7 a.m., when the community center’s daytime crowd starts to show up. 'I tell these [little] ones: "We’re living a learning experience,’ " Amador says. “ ‘I don’t want you guys to go through this with your kids.’ ”

Why Can’t California Solve Its Housing Crisis?

It’s the epicenter of the tech industry and the wealthiest, most progressive state in the union, but homelessness is surging — and no one can agree on how to fix it


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'NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC' COVERAGE OF NEW STUDY FINGERING NEONICS FOR JAPANESE FISHERIES COLLAPSE. A new peer-reviewed study published in 'Science' lays stern blame on the precipitous collapse of fisheries in Japan – and elsewhere – on a class of farm chemical insecticides know as "Neonicitinoids."
Of course, Certified Organic farmers such as ourselves (https://www.woodprairie.com/) successfully grow our crops NEVER using synthetic persistent toxins such as Neonics. They are absolutely PROHIBITED in organic production. Caleb, Megan & Jim

"In May of 1993, rice farmers living near Lake Shinji, in southwestern Japan, began widely using an insecticide called imidacloprid.

"Within the same year, populations of arthropods that form the base of the food web, such as crustaceans and zooplankton, began to plummet. By the end of 1994, two commercially important fish that depend on these creatures for food, eel and smelt, crashed as well. And as the use of imidacloprid and other neonicotinoids has grown over the years, the fish have never recovered…

"…scientists think that Japan is not an isolated example, but rather a dramatic illustration of neonicotinoids’ potential to seriously harm aquatic ecosystems worldwide…

"When the scientists averaged populations of the lake’s zooplankton—tiny crustaceans and other animals eaten by fish—for 12 years before and after the introduction of neonicotinoids in 1993, they found that mean zooplankton biomass declined by 83 percent…

"'Neonicotinoids need to be much more tightly regulated,' says Nathan Donley, with the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, who suggests that this paper is one more reason to invest much more heavily in research into non-chemical means of pest control, such as multiple cropping, the use of cover crops, and the like…

"The researchers closed out their paper by quoting Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring, about pesticides: 'These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams.'

"Now, nearly 60 years later, they note, Carson’s words are eerily prescient. 'The ecological and economic impact of neonicotinoids on the inland waters of Japan confirms Carson’s prophecy,' they conclude."

How the world’s most widely used insecticide led to a fishery collapse

Neonicotinoids wiped out plankton and fish in a Japanese lake, and are likely harming aquatic ecosystems worldwide, new research suggests.


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WOOD PRAIRIE POTATO HARVEST. Circa 2010. Photo by New Zealand photographer Lottie Hedley. Lottie was studying in Maine in the Summer and Fall of 2010. In Ansel Adams-like-style, Lottie preferred shooting and developing her own photos in Black & White.
Caleb's sister, Amy, was seven at the time and helping us by gleaning Organic Seed Potatoes (https://www.woodprairie.com/…/certified-organic-seed-potato…) left behind by our Finnish potato harvester. Given the youthful, revolutionary zeal on display, we all came to refer to this photograph as "The Russian Photo." Caleb, Megan & Jim

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MAINE AS ONE GOOD EXAMPLE: HOW WE'RE OVERCOMING POLARIZING DYSFUNCTION. (Hint: 'Clean Election' Public Campaign Financing Works Very Well).
An essay delving into the State of Maine's 'Dirigo' ("I Lead") spirit. Written by by 'Diet for a Small Planet' author Frances Moore Lappe. Caleb, Megan & Jim

"How often I hear that in 'polarized' America rural voters will reject a green agenda out of hand. For them, green means liberal, tree-hugging snobs, unconcerned about the struggles of real working people…

"Given her youth, it’s striking that Maxmin now represents a district with one of the oldest populations of any district in the country. Three quarters of her district lies in Lincoln County, where roughly 28 percent of residents are older than 65—a share exceeding the national average by 75 percent.

"And how did she win against all odds?

"First, Maxmin was helped by Maine’s 1996 'Clean Elections' law entitling candidates for the state legislature to receive public financing—if they first collect from voters in their district a certain number of small contributions. For a seat in Maine’s House, it’s sixty $5.00 contributions. They also agree not to raise or spend any private money. Maine’s 'Clean Elections' law levels the campaign-playing field, making running for office accessible to anyone regardless of income or background. It helps to hold candidates accountable to the voters, not to their funders."

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