It is very disturbing to hear about towns and cities across the country ending their recycling programs, or collecting the bottles and cans, only to send them to landfills. Countries like China and India don’t want our garbage anymore, and the cost of recycling has gotten too expensive to do it here. Some towns are burning the plastic to use as energy, only to be adding to our green house gas emissions. We need some smart innovators to come up with a solution! However, in the meantime and for the long term, we all need to reduce the amount of plastic and glass we use. Start washing out all of your empty glass jars, removing the labels, and use them as food storage containers instead of plastic. Invest in a water filter system, and bottle your own water, using a recyclable bottle. If you like sparkling water, invest in a soda stream, and make your own! We all need to do our part in addressing this problem.

Dairy Farmers depend on a migrant labor force, and ICE is getting in the way! There are some programs that allow immigrants to come over and work on a farm during the growing season, but for dairy farmers, there is no season. Their work is all year long, and the fear of their workers getting deported, is causing huge amounts of stress on our dairy farmers. In upstate New York, and across the country, dairy farmers depend on undocumented workers to keep their operations going, but ICE has been relentless in roadside checkpoints and racial profiling anytime a worker leaves the farm. If one undocumented worker gets arrested, then ICE has grounds to come onto the farm and look for others, putting farmers out of business. Small organic dairy farmers are already struggling to stay afloat, with the competition of huge mega farms managing to get organic certification, even though their cows never see the light of day! It is a sad moment in our history. To find out if your milk is really organic, check out the Cornucopia Dairy Scorecard!