Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the goal was to save $150 million a year in the agency’s $145 billion budget. About $90 million had already been saved by reducing travel and supplies, and the closures were expected to save another $60 million, he said.

The plan calls for 259 offices, labs and other facilities to be closed, affecting the USDA headquarters in Washington and operations in 46 states. Seven foreign offices also will be shut.

Some of the closures had been previously announced. The USDA said last year it would shut down 10 agricultural research stations, including the only one in Alaska, where scientists were seeking ways to use the vast waste generated by the largest wild fishery in the nation to make everything from gel caps for pills to fish meal for livestock feed.

Other parts of the announcement were a surprise. Andrew Lorenz, deputy district manager for the Food Safety and Inspection Service in Minneapolis, learned his office would be closed, along with those in Madison, Wis., and Lawrence, Kan.

“They wiped out the entire Midwest,” said Lorenz, whose office handles all federal inspections of meat, poultry and egg products in Minnesota, Montana, the Dakotas and Wyoming.

 FSIS offices in Chicago and Des Moines will remain open. It was not immediately clear whether work from the other offices would be shifted to them.

Lorenz said about 16 people work in his office, and he expected 12 to 14 of their jobs to be eliminated. A USDA spokeswoman said employees would be given the opportunity to transfer to other offices whenever possible.

Elisabeth Hagen, undersecretary for food safety, said the closures would affect management and support staff as FSIS offices are consolidated from 15 to 10, but that there wouldn’t be a reduction in inspectors or inspection work.

“There will be no reduction in inspection presence at slaughter and processing facilities and no risk for consumers,” Hagen said.

“Not only do we have a statutory obligation to be in every facility, we have an unwavering commitment to food safety,” she added. “We will still be on the job, in every facility, every day.”

Vilsack said he didn’t anticipate widespread layoffs, in part because 7,000 USDA employees took early retirements over the past year. He said the agency is trying to do more with less in light of federal cutbacks, and many of the offices to be closed had few employees or were near other offices.

“Our workload is at record highs, we have less money and fewer people and work to do and we tried to address how do you do that without interrupting service,” Vilsack said in a phone call from Honolulu, where he was speaking to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

The USDA manages a wide array of programs, from emergency aid for farmers to grants for rural development and food assistance programs for the poor. Along with the Agricultural Research and Food Safety and Inspection services, six other departments will be affected by closures, including the Farm Service Agency and Rural Development.

Kevin Ross, 31, a sixth-generation farmer in Iowa, expressed concern about how services would be affected. Farmers could drop out of programs if they have to travel long distances, he said.

“Access to agencies is a big deal, especially in rural areas,” said Ross, who grows 400 acres of corn on his farm near Minden. “It’s easy to say it looks like great cost savings, but I hope they are careful and strategic in their decisions.”

Vilsack said public hearings will be held in counties where Farm Service Agency offices are to be closed. That department handles disaster assistance, farm loans and crop subsidies, among other programs. The USDA plans to shut 131 FSA offices in 32 states, with largest number of closures in Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas.

Bruce Babcock, a farm economist at Iowa State University and director of the school’s Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, said consolidation was a long time coming, given that advances in technology made it possible to file applications and do other tasks over the phone or online. He said he’s more concerned about the USDA’s ability to maintain programs that deal with disease prevention.

“The capability to collect data and do the behind the scenes activities that really help U.S. agriculture stay safe, that should be concerning,” Babcock said.

Colin Woodall, a spokesman for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which represents more than 147,000 ranchers nationwide, applauded the USDA for trying to save taxpayers’ money in tight economic times but also expressed concern about food safety.

“We can’t say this is all great news because some offices will be closed,” he said. “We have to make sure we have the process in place to keep food safe.”

Vilsack said the closures and other cost-cutting measures will allow the agency to keep investing in programs that make agriculture more productive, including maintaining credit to farmers, providing aid to beginning farmers and scientific research.

“Over the long haul, we believe farmers and ranchers across the country will be better served by the choices we made,” he said.

But that was of little consolation to California cotton growers mourning the loss of the 80-year-old agriculture research station at Shafter, which solved many of the industry’s pest and fungus issues.

Calcot, a growers’ co-op that sells more than a million bales annually, had lobbied officials to keep the center, which lately has been working to address fusarium wilt, a soil-dwelling fungus that attacks cotton plants.

“This is going to be to the detriment of the U.S. cotton industry and ultimately the world because so much research there has benefited growers everywhere,” Calcot spokesman Mark Bagby said.

Associated Press writers Tracie Cone in Fresno, Calif.; Doug Glass in Minneapolis; Dan Joling in Anchorage, Alaska; and Justin Juozapavicius in Tulsa, Okla., contributed to this report.

 source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/usda-office-closures_n_1195876.html

Washington D.C. (November 17, 2011) – Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a longtime advocate of children’s nutrition, today released the following statement after language was inserted into the Fiscal Year 2012 Agriculture, Rural Development Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies Appropriations act that prevents the Department of Agriculture from implementing new school lunch standards.

“I strongly support a number of provisions in H.R. 2112, the Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food & Drug Administration and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, such as the vital funding for low-income food assistance programs. I must voice my outrage at language included in this legislation which blatantly ignores and imperils the health of this country’s school children.

“Just days ago, language was inserted into H.R. 2112 which prevents the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) from implementing important new school lunch standards that are scheduled to go into effect next year. The language also allows pizza, if it has at least two tablespoons of tomato paste, to be defined as a vegetable.

“Childhood obesity is a disease affecting 17% children throughout the country. According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years and in 2008, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese. Nationally subsidized meals at schools have a responsibility to feed our children healthy and nutritious food. The USDA has developed new school nutrition standards and is ready to implement them. Instead, we are allowing these industries to make and keep our children sick, to put them at risk for serious cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, stroke, osteoarthritis and several types of cancer.

“The needs of special interest groups are being put ahead of the health needs of children across the country. By including these provisions, we are allowing the salt, potato growers and frozen food industries to continue feeding the childhood obesity epidemic. According to the Institute of Medicine, a typical high school lunch contains around 1,600 milligrams of sodium; this is more than half of the daily recommended amount.

“One of the largest barriers that school nutrition programs face is cost. This is why I have authored a bill that would eliminate the tax deductibility of advertising and marketing of fast food and junk food that targets children. Despite the fact that research shows that marketing and advertising is a primary factor in increasing obesity rates in children, the tax code allows companies to deduct their advertising and marketing costs from tax returns. The government essentially subsidizes childhood obesity. My legislation has the potential to raise billions of dollars to pay for student nutrition programs.”

Source: http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=269526

According to the study, a whopping $17 billion of the total $260 billion the government spent subsidizing agriculture went to just four common food addititives: corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch and soy oils. By comparison, the government spent just $261 million subsidizing apples, and far less still supporting fruits and vegetables, like spinach, broccoli and blueberries, that public health experts say encourage better health. To put things in perspective, the PIRG study said that, if the government had given taxpayers the subsidies instead of the farmers, each one would have been given $7.36 to spend on junk food and just 11 cents to spend on apples a year. This is a key factor that makes junk food more expensive than healthy food — and, by extension, that makes many Americans obese.

It’s possible, though, that the era of huge farm subsidies may be coming to a close. Food Safety News notes that Obama called for a massive cut to farm subsidies for the 2012 budget. The cuts were proposed as a part of his deficit reduction plan — but this new study shows how far subsidy changes could go towards cutting obesity rates as well. Mark Bittman, for his part, has repeatedly called for farm subsidy reform rather than elimination, in the hopes that the government will make it easier for Americans to afford healthy food.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/22/farm-subsidies-junk-food_n_975711.html

So far this season, growers of blueberries and peaches in the Garden State have not reported damage from spotted wing drosophila, which are more commonly known as vinegar flies or fruit flies. Scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey are tracking drosophila populations and advising growers on crop protection measures.

A native of Southeast Asia, drosophila was first confirmed in the United States in 2008 in California. Since then, the pest has been found in Florida, Washington, and six other U.S. fruit-producing states, and in five Canadian provinces. Drosophila pierce the skin of soft fruits and lay eggs in them. Tiny holes on the skin of fruits and maggots in their flesh are telltale signs of the pest.

Source: http://www.thepacker.com/fruit-vegetable-news/USDA-confirms-fruit-pest-in-New-Jersey-128239398.html

At a time when the federal government is conducted SWAT-style armed raids on raw milk farmers, accusing them of selling “pathogenic” milk, another regulatory department of that same government brazenly stands by and allows deadly pathogen-contaminated meat to be openly sold without offering any warning whatsoever to the public.

Once the fatalities start to mount, of course, then the USDA springs into action and announces a recall. This, of course, has the effect of spreading fear about contaminated food — something that both the USDA and FDA then use to call for stronger food safety legislation such as the recently-passed Food Safety Modernization Act. (Problem, reaction, solution, see?)

In this case, the USDA announced a Cargill recall on August 3, 2011, affecting 36 million pounds of ground turkey that may be contaminated with salmonella. But this was only after at least one person died and 77 others were sickened by the contaminated meat, says the WSJ.

The important fact in this story is that the USDA knew about the salmonella contamination in 2010 and did nothing about it. Its own tests showed Cargill’s turkey to be contaminated with salmonella at four different retail stores selling the meat, and still the USDA did nothing.

How did all this happen?

Astonishingly, current USDA regulations allow a meat production facility to pass inspection even if 49.9% of the meat is contaminated with salmonella. So even when the USDA is inspecting facilities, they can be downright filthy from a pathogenic point of view, with nearly half of all the meat contaminated, and the USDA still gives it a stamp of approval! It is in this way that the USDA, which is of course a complete prostitute of the meat industry, openly allows grossly contaminated meat to be sold to an unsuspecting public which thinks that meat is “USDA inspected.”

Sure it is! But the inspection only means that slightly less than HALF the meat you buy can be contaminated with pathogenic bacteria.

Meanwhile, when it comes to raw farmers, federal officials conduct armed raids on places like Rawesome Foods (http://www.naturalnews.com/033220_R…) even when no one is harmed! Notice the outrageous double standard? When it comes to raw milk, the feds scream about how dangerous it is (even though no one has been harmed) and how deadly the raw milk bacteria are (even when they’re friendly probiotics). But when it comes to raw meat, deadly pathogens are perfectly fine with the feds, and they even wait around for people to die from consuming it before bothering to issue a recall.

And they never conduct raids on Cargill factories, or Tyson chicken farms, or any of the other huge corporate food production factories that produce the bulk of the contaminated food supply in America. Two-thirds of all store-bought chickens are contaminated with salmonella too, didn’t you know? (http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c…)

So this whole idea of “food safety” and the hope that Big Government is somehow going to make our food supply safer is a complete joke. It’s the government that stays silent even when it knows about dangerous food contamination and then waits around for people to die so that it can call for tighter food regulations and more funding for its own departments.

This is very nearly a “false flag food attack” on America. It’s designed to actually cause fatalities and generate press headlines on the dangers of foods so that the public will react with a call for stronger food regulations. But the real source of the problem, of course, is that both the USDA and the FDA are complete sellouts who routinely attack and intimidate innocent American farmers while totally ignoring the real food crimes being committed by the large food conglomerates that operate with impunity.

http://www.naturalnews.com/033283_ground_turkey_salmonella.html#ixzz1VCV

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal officials said Monday that one person has died from salmonella poisoning that appears to be linked to eating ground turkey, but the government so far has declined to say who produced the meat or initiate a recall.

Seventy-six people in 26 states have been made sick from the same strain of the disease, which the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is resistant to many commonly prescribed antibiotics. The CDC did not say where the person who died became sick and released no details about the death.

The illnesses date back to March, and the CDC said Monday that cultures of ground turkey from four retail locations between March 7 and June 27 showed Salmonella contamination. The agency said preliminary information showed that three of the samples have been linked to the same production establishment but did not name the retailers or the manufacturers.

The Agriculture Department oversees meat safety and would be the agency to announce a recall. The department sent out an alert about the illnesses late last week telling consumers to properly cook their meat, which can decrease the chances of salmonella poisoning. But the department has not given consumers any further warnings about the source of the tainted meat.

The USDA did not respond to requests for comment Monday on why there has not been a recall. The CDC said it and the USDA were ” vigorously working to identify the specific contaminated product or products that are causing illnesses and will update the public on the progress of this investigation as information becomes available.”

Food safety advocate Bill Marler, an attorney who has represented victims of the nation’s biggest food-borne illness outbreaks, said he believes the three positive samples should prompt a recall.

“Consumers have no idea what to do except not eat ground turkey,” he said.

The illnesses are spread all over the country. The states with the highest number sickened were Michigan and Ohio, 10 illnesses each, while nine illnesses were reported in Texas. Illinois had seven, California six and Pennsylvania five.

The remaining states have between one and three reported illnesses linked to the outbreak, according to the CDC: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

The CDC said 26 states were affected but only listed 25 states in which illnesses were reported in a news release issued Monday evening.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gM9a6xxvy6Y3DN1Erx5dYo3_W7IQ?docId=19c0b53c70044c8fa0e44d5afee26ab2

The Agriculture Department wants consumers to know when there’s less chicken in their chicken. A proposed rule aimed at food companies would require poultry and other raw meats be labeled appropriately when they’re plumped up by added solutions such as chicken broth, teriyaki sauce, salt or water. The practice of adding those ingredients is common but many consumers don’t realize it. According to Elisabeth Hagen, head of food safety at the USDA, about one-third of poultry, 10 percent of beef and 90 percent of pork may have added ingredients — about 40 percent of all raw whole cuts of meat. The rule does not apply to ground beef which may have other added substances. An example of the new labels would be “chicken breast — 40% added solution of water and teriyaki sauce,” according to USDA.

Source: http://www.tampabay.com/incoming/how-much-chicken-in-that-chicken-clearer-meat-additive-labeling-proposed/1181752

Inspect cars, trucks, airplanes, manufacturing facilities, construction equipment, buildings, schools, homes, bridges, roads, highways and more. Versions of the mobile solutions include on-screen stylus and fingertip markups, electronic signature, online checklists, image capture, and report generation, all from the field. 

 US Food Safety likes the idea of a mobile app, as this might speed up the inspection process and keep consumers safer by shutting down manufacturing facilities that do not pass regulations.  We hope the FDA and USDA will give this mobile app a second look.