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Get Cultivated

Even if you don't drive a combine or herd cattle, your food choices affect how land is farmed and how well rural environments are protected. Here are some agricultural resources worth harvesting:

MEAT FACTORIES
Concentrated animal feeding operations, which cram thousands of cows, hogs, or chickens in unsanitary barracks, produce hundreds of billions of pounds of waste each year. Family farmers around the country have joined with Sierra Club activists to protect drinking water, lakes, and rivers from these mammoth facilities. For more information, go to www.sierraclub.org/factoryfarms. To ease yourself into pig politics, read the musings of Ken Midkiff, director of the Club's Clean Water Campaign (and a onetime Future Farmer of America) at www.sierraclub.org/roadtrip/lowplainsdrifter.

HELP FROM THE HILL
In February, the Senate passed a farm appropriations bill that would encourage farmers to safeguard clean water, preserve wetlands, and prevent suburban sprawl. Sponsored by Iowa senator Tom Harkin, the legislation would double funding for conservation programs, a vast improvement over the Farm Bill passed by the House late last year. For updates, go to www.sierraclub.org/cleanwater/waterquality/farmbill.asp.

PROFILES IN TILLAGE
To learn how some family farmers thrive with fewer chemicals and less harm to the environment, read The New American Farmer: Profiles of Agricultural Innovation.

Produced by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this book is available on the Web at www.sare.org/newfarmer.

RAISING AWARENESS
For a better understanding of modern farming, read Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology and Island Press, which looks at our ecologically destructive agricultural system and offers a vision for a safer way to produce food. Essays by leading ecological thinkers, including Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, David Ehrenfeld, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, and Gary Nabhan are accompanied by more than 250 photographs. After reading it, you'll no longer be able to disconnect the foods you eat from the industrial system that produces them. For more information, go to www.islandpress.org.