In The News

Fall 2011

CAFO. We are continuing our forays into the heart of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation country. In late June we visited Indiana, a current target of large-scale hog and dairy producers looking for a new state to expand their vile form of food production into.

On a beautiful summer Saturday afternoon, at the annual Indiana CAFO Watch Conference, Dan Imhoff spoke to an auditorium packed with intelligent and concerned citizens. Unfortunately, many times not even engaged voters can stop the infiltration of CAFOs into communities or counties that lack the necessary ordinances and regulations to shield themselves from animal waste and stench.

Joining Dan on the panel was Dr. William Weida of the Socially Responsible Agricultural Project, which sponsored the conference, who explained the high economic costs of CAFOs to society. Veterinarian Dr. Meghan Davis of John’s Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future gave an amazing explanation of the basics of antibiotic resistance. And Dr. Lisa Underwood, lead for the Water Quality Team of the Environmental Branch, US Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville District, explained how animal wastes pollute public waterways. The CAFO book was also a big star.

In July the campaign touched home when Dan engaged Michael Dimmock of Roots of Change in conversation in an event hosted by Point Reyes Books and sponsored by Marin Organic.

Through events such as these we are continuing to get the word out about our Putting the CAFO Out to Pasture campaign. As if to prove the importance of this work, the very next month Cargill recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey produced at an Arkansas plant after at least one person had died and 76 fallen ill with salmonella infection. Things aren’t slowing down in the world of contaminated animal food products.

Food Fight 2012. Continuing the visits to middle America, this time in support of the locavore movement and the need for a healthy Food and Farm Bill, Dan gave the keynote address at the third annual Kentucky Farmer’s Fair in Covington, KY, in mid-August. This delightful event celebrates local farms and foods of the Ohio River valley and northern Kentucky region. Read his essay, “Eating Consciously,” written specifically for the event.

Meanwhile, we are working hard on updating and revising Food Fight to make it the best resource possible for citizens to inform themselves about the Food and Farm Bill. Look for it on shelves in February 2012 or pre-order here.

An Oral History of Food Choices. Dan Imhoff was in Voices from the Food Revolution: People Who Changed the Way Americans Eat, an oral history archive developed by Judy Weinraub for the Fales Library of New York University. This valuable research resource brings together the stories of scholars, food writers, and food professionals. Dan is honored to have been chosen to be part of this project.

Farm Bill 101: Why It Matters, Dan Imhoff. That’s the teaser on the front cover of the October 13, 2011, issue of The Nation. Inside, beginning on p. 27, Dan explains exactly why each one of us should care about this legislation that’s up for renewal on September 30, 2012. Grab a copy of The Nation from a newsstand or read the essay in PDF form on our website.

New Employee. We are delighted to welcome Hallie Detrick to the team here at Watershed Media. Hallie recently graduated from Lewis & Clark College in Oregon with a BA, majoring in sociology and anthropology and with a minor in political economy. She is working as a researcher, fact checker, and editor on the extensive update and revision of Food Fight, due out in November.

Hallie’s senior thesis was an analysis of the ideology of food choices, looking particularly at the Slow Food movement. Now she has dived head first into the intricacies of the Farm Bill as she works to ensure that Food Fight: The Citizens Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill contains accurate facts, a minimum of repetition, and is cohesive and comprehensible.

“Everyone is very easy to work with, smart, and dedicated to the cause,” Hallie says. “I’m enjoying learning more about the Farm Bill and farming. I like the back and forth of this work, it’s exciting.”

Her long-term goal is to move to D.C. and become involved in enabling subject-matter experts to talk directly to policy makers on the Hill and elsewhere, “so there’s not such a disconnect between legislation and information,” she says.

Spring 2011

Awards, Awards Everywhere! Watershed Media titles are winning awards!

In early May we received word that CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories had been declared the 2011 Nautilus Gold Award Winner in the category of Conscious Media/Journalism/Investigative Reporting. The book was prominently displayed with its medal sticker at BookExpo America in New York.

The Nautilus Awards recognizes books that promote spiritual growth, conscious living and positive social change, while at the same time stimulating the imagination and offering the reader new possibilities for a better life and a better world. Fellow 2011 Gold Award winners include Prince Charles, Desmond Tutu, Maria Rodale and Jeremy Rifkin, as well as books put out by major publishers such as Penguin, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins. We are truly honored to be in such company.

Hard on the heels of that exciting news came an email notifying us that three Watershed Media titles had won Independent Publisher Book Awards (known as “IPPYs”)!

In the national IPPYs, The Post Carbon Reader  tied for gold in the category of Environment/Ecology/Nature. Congratulations to the folks at the Post Carbon Institute who put so much work into creating this book. The honor is well deserved!

The two CAFO books—the large format photo book, CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories and The CAFO Reader—were named Outstanding Books of the Year in the category “Most Likely to Save the Planet.” That’s why we published them!

These awards are fantastic recognition that these books may indeed help to move humanity closer to a sustainable life on a healthy planet.

The “IPPY” Awards, launched in 1996, are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers. Established as the first awards program open exclusively to independents, over 2,500 IPPYs have been awarded to authors and publishers around the world. The Awards recognize 12 Outstanding Books of the Year and gold, silver and bronze medal winners in 69 categories. This year’s winners were selected from 3,907 entries.

CAFO Outreach Campaign. A national outreach campaign centered around CAFO and The CAFO Reader is firing on all burners. We’re in the midst of a ten-event tour that began in Santa Rosa, California, and touches down in the heart of CAFO country—Kentucky, Illinois, Washington, and Indiana—as well as big metropolitan centers like New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Listen to Dan Imhoff’s plenary talk on animal agriculture at the EcoFarm Conference 2011. Check out recent blog posts to read Dan’s notes from the field.

In mid-February we cosponsored a CAFO legal strategy meeting with the Center for Food Safety in Sausalito, California. This meeting brought together 20 legal experts from around the country to discuss the state of regulations, litigation, and anti-CAFO ballot initiatives. This was the first in a series of strategy meetings that we’re co-hosting with the Center for Food Safety to build strategic alliances, heighten activism, and create a movement.

The CAFO books have been getting national attention! Huffington Post published an article by Dan called "Honoring the Food Animals on Your Plate." The article ran along with a slide show of images from the book and generated eight pages of reader comments almost immediately—obviously, people care about the topic.

In the March 2011 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, B.R. Myers referred to the "excellent book The CAFO Reader" in his rumination on foodies and gluttony.

Thousands of copies of the large format photo book CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories and the companion CAFO Reader are being distributed by organizations all around the country—as well as in the UK and Canada. Every week we receive messages from people who feel this book has changed their lives and given them purpose.

Food Fight. The Farm Bill 2012 debate is heating up and we know we have tons of fans who are waiting and counting on us for the update of this popular book. We’re working hard to create a 2010 edition that will be up-to-date and relevant and a real organizing resource. Look for it by fall, distributed by the University of California Press. Pre-order your copy now!

Dan has already made several talks on the subject, including at the annual gathering of Edible Communities in Santa Barbara and most recently to a packed hall at the University of Washington.

This book remains the go-to primer for people who want to know about this super-important legislation. Buy a copy, read it, pass it on, and form a Farm Bill Food Fight chapter in your area. (This is what the City of Seattle has done to organize for the next Food and Farm Bill.)

Radio Interviews. For twelve years Dan Imhoff and Northern California biodynamic apple farmer Tim Bates hosted a popular monthly radio program – the 4th Monday Farm and Garden Show – on KZYX & Z, Mendocino County public radio. During that run, Dan and Tim interviewed many of the leading voices in the sustainable agriculture movement. Dan’s final interview, in December 2010, was with Wendell Berry, a conversation that has been called a "lovely piece of poetic review about farming and place." Some of the best of the Farm and Garden interviews are available free on the Watershed Media web site. More will be coming. Listen to conversations with Robert Kennedy, Jr., Vandana Shiva, Temple Grandin, Eliot Coleman, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Wes Jackson, Paul Stammetts, and many more...

e-Books. Your favorite Watershed Media titles will soon be available electronically for iPads, Kindles, and other hand-held reading devices! The Post Carbon Institute is putting the final touches on an e-book edition of The Post Carbon Reader, and we will soon be releasing e-book versions of The CAFO Reader and Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature. Check our web site for updates and purchasing info.

Radish Wisdom. Finally a note of family pride. Our Watershed Media family includes long-time researcher Emmett Hopkins, whose wife, Lynda, has written an engaging account of their first year as greenhorn farmers.

Called The Wisdom of the Radish, the hardcover version has just been released by Sasquatch Press. Visit Lynda and Emmett's blog for more information (and a great read!).

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Winter 2010

Wild Farm Alliance. In mid-December Watershed Media hosted the annual board meeting of the Wild Farm Alliance at our Northern California office, the second consecutive year we’ve had the honor. Together, we charted a mid-range work plan for this organization that continues to be a champion for biodiversity protection and restoration within the sustainable agriculture movement.

The Wild Farm Alliance is now moving into its eleventh year, and Watershed Media has collaborated with this excellent organization on two stellar books Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature (soon to be an e-book) and Farming with the Wild. We look forward to many more years of partnership.

CAFO. Four thousand copies of the large format photo book CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories have now been distributed to more than ten organizations for outreach efforts. Groups such as the Center for Food Safety, Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, and Center for a Livable Future are handing copies directly to policy makers, hosting events, and educating their staff on this vital subject. And this is just the beginning.

The new year brings a long series of events as part of our own outreach campaign, including Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C., with Martha Noble, Andy Kimbrell and Jay Graham; the 2011 Eco-Farm plenary in Pacific Grove, California; panel discussions at Murray State University and Bellarmine University in Kentucky; and a high-profile appearance in New York City. See our events calendar for details.

February 8, 6:30-8:30 p.m. CAFO
Murray State University
“Food Fight: Working for Sustainable Meat”
Contact Dianna Riddick, diannariddick@gmail.com

February 9, 7:30-8:30 p.m. CAFO
Bellarmine University
“Food Fight: Working for Sustainable Meat”

February 22, 6-8 p.m.
Food and Water Watch, San Francisco

March 1 Food Fight
University of Washington
Discussion with author Daniel Imhoff about the importance of the Farm Bill
and why it matters to all of us.

March 28, 6:30-8:30 p.m. CAFO
Clocktower Resort, 7801 E. State St., Rockford, IL
“When a Mega Dairy Comes In”
Call 815-745-9013 for info

March 29, 7-9 p.m. CAFO
Bradley University, Peoria, IL

Early April — New York City (TBD)

Please get in touch with us if you want to consider hosting an event in your area.

We’ve also launched a new campaign page on the web site if you’d like to find out what you can do.

Food Fight. We’re deep in the throes of updating Food Fight for the 2012 Farm Bill reauthorization. This is destined to be a very hot topic, with the fiscal conservative takeover of Congress, the rising concern over staggering budget deficits, the glaring inequalities in the distribution of subsidies primarily to the largest farms and just a narrow range of crops, and growing awareness of the essential link between our health and the food we eat and how we produce it. (Please read The Healthy Food Declaration and consider signing on if you haven’t already.)

Watershed Media is interviewing key players and experts, attending conferences, fund raising, and researching to put together a top-notch campaign tool. Look for the revised Food Fight on our web site and in your local bookstores this June, distributed by the University of California Press and a host of collaborating nonprofits!

e-Books. Soon you will be able to read a growing selection of Watershed Media titles on your e-book reader! The team at the Post Carbon Institute is putting the Post Carbon Reader into eBook format and we are doing the same with Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature. We hope to have both books available in February. Stay tuned!

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Fall 2010

Smart By Nature Wins. The Santa Monica Public Library has awarded Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature in the category of Education. The award will be presented on Saturday, November 6 at 11 a.m., at the library.

Even though the book has been out for a year, the Center for Ecoliteracy’s campaign is still going strong. Independent School Magazine, the journal of the National Association of Independent Schools, published a 6-page review and excerpt of Smart By Nature in its Fall issue.

Smart By Nature truly is a transformative resource and book sales back this up. It is currently on press for its second print run! Spread the word to others about this great book. Buy one for your favorite teacher or school board member!

CAFO Campaign Off and Running. The large format photo book, CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, is making its way around the country and leaving a large trail. Just this past month, two of the biggest newspapers in the U.S., the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, ran full-page articles condemning the state of factory animal agriculture today. Both Dan Imhoff and the book were featured. Monica Eng’s excellent article in the Tribune was subsequently picked up by dozens of papers.

Carney & Associates is arranging an extensive round of PR around the book. All want to hear about the making of this book that is looking more and more as though it will have the world-changing impact we hope it will. Two dozen radio appearances are scheduled over the next two months with speaking engagements lining up for late 2010 and early 2011.

Media coverage of the large photo book and The CAFO Reader runs the gamut of top online food, farming and news publications, including Civil Eats, Grist, and TreeHugger, as well as venerable print publications such as Orion Magazine and the London Times Literary Supplement.

A launch event featured a panel discussion with Dan Imhoff, Mac Magruder, a rancher who raises and sells pasture pork and grass-fed beef in Potter Valley, Stephanie Larson, a livestock and range management farm advisor with the UC Cooperative Extension who organized the Sonoma County Meat Buying Club, and Duskie Estes, a competitor on The Next Iron Chef season 3, local foods champion and owner of Santa Rosa’s Zazu Restaurant, was held in Sonoma County on October 14.

In the next few months the Foundation for Deep Ecology will be shipping pallets of the book to organizations across the country that will use it as the centerpiece—or, as we like to say, monsterpiece—of educational outreach efforts. Stay tuned here or check in with your local ecologically conscious organization for updates on what’s happening where and when.

Listen to Radio Ecoshock’s interview with Dan.

Log onto www.cafothebook.org for excerpts, photos, a video trailer, tips for what you can do, and more.

The Post Carbon Reader Comes out 10/10/10. Copies of this book arrived in our office in the last week of September. The Post Carbon Institute has done a tremendous job with this book that examines critical challenges facing the planet in the 21st century and charts numerous paths toward sustainability. Edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, the book’s full title is The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises. Note the plural.

This is what Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, says about the Reader :

"For a comprehensive, integrated overview of the relationship between the human species and its planetary home circa 2010, look no further. The Post Carbon Reader is an invaluable primer, resource, and textbook. This is what you need to know—period."

UC Press listed the Post Carbon Reader as being one of the top five sellers in their Fall catalogue. Go to www.postcarbon.org/reader for info and a 20% discount. Handsome, free PDFs of some of the essays are available for download, too.

Food Fight. Our citizens’ guide to the food and farm bill, first published in January 2007, is now being rewritten to take into account all that has happened in the past three-plus years. Stay tuned as the importance of this legislation to the country’s food system and health has not abated in the least.

Social Networking. We’re crawling out from under the rocks into the 21st century. Check us out on Facebook and Twitter.

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Summer 2010

CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories.
In a chilling and perhaps telling coincidence, the large format photo book, CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, arrived in the warehouse just as the FDA recalled half a billion eggs from two factories in Iowa. But this was just the headline du jour. Earlier in August 2010 a million pounds of E. coli contaminated hamburger was recalled. This followed by 380,000 pounds of listeria infected deli meats.

The CAFO Reader was released in July and we’ve been getting it out to activists, health leaders, policy makers, media, professors and other audiences ever since. But this is far from simply a national issue. We’ve received calls from concerned activists as far away as England (where applications for mega-dairies are increasing) and France (whose beaches in Brittany are suffering from strange algae blooms linked to industrial hog and chicken operations).

The balance of voices in these books was intentional and others apparently appreciate the editorial approach. Paula Crossfield of Civil Eats featured the book in a July 16 interview, which shot around the Internet in a flurry. Read Paula’s interview with Dan.

The print production on the large format CAFO book by publisher Earth Aware is everything we had hoped for. Pictures tell a thousand words and this collection of CAFO industry photos depicts a horror show. We are sure this book will become an invaluable contribution to the movement to reform industrial animal agriculture.

Both CAFO and The CAFO Reader are now a centerpiece of our "Putting the CAFO out to Pasture" campaign, soon to be supported by a website, www.cafothebook.org, a video trailer, and event series to make sure that all the time, effort, and resources that went into the project are optimized. Let us know if you’d like to get involved by hosting an event.

CAFO and The CAFO Reader are both available in all the usual online and book store outlets, but if you are going to buy a copy of either and would like to see your dollars support the campaign, please consider purchasing directly from us. Watershed Media is a non-profit organization dedicated to an agriculture system that is sustainable for all–animals, ecosystems... and humans. Every purchase made directly from our website supports these ongoing efforts. Thank you.

Smart by Nature. Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability, our landmark collaboration with The Center for Ecoliteracy that chronicles environmentally grounded K-12 education, has sold out far ahead of schedule and will go into a second print run. This outstanding resource remains the focus of an ongoing educational outreach effort by the great staff at The Center for Ecoliteracy. Check out their work if you aren’t already familiar with it.

Post Carbon Reader. Although you can’t necessarily judge a book by its cover, The Post Carbon Reader has a great one. It’s also packed full of essays about urgent issues and public policies that simply must be distributed and read widely. Editing and production of The Post Carbon Reader were a great focus over the summer by our partners at the Post Carbon Institute and the book is due out in mid-October.

Check out this video, featuring PCI fellow and Reader coeditor Richard Heinberg, about the reality of where we’re headed as a carbon-dependent civilization.

 

Other News. Reel Thing Productions has released the film "Bag It," a feature-length documentary that examines the impacts of plastic on environmental and human health and showcases a number of alternatives and solutions. Watershed Media director Dan Imhoff was interviewed by the filmmakers and makes an appearance in the movie. We haven’t seen it yet, so we can’t vouch for his performance, but the documentary is screening now. Go see it and judge for yourself!

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Spring 2010

CAFO. We’re deep in production mode on The CAFO Reader, to be released by UC Press on June 10. CAFO is the acronym of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations—factory animal farms. The CAFO Reader is a text-only collection of the outstanding essays (plus four extras) from the large format CAFO book, a stunning,

CAFO is the culmination of many years of hard work, sweat, and tears. It gathers between two covers images from photographers from around the globe that show with chilling clarity the horrific conditions under which most of our animal-based foods are produced. Paired with the photos are essays by writers such as Wendell Berry, Anna Lappé, Michael Pollan, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Matthew Scully, the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, and many others who have spent decades investigating and fighting CAFO-style farming.

We have high hopes that this is going to be the activist book that we conceived of when we accepted the task of producing this project some time ago. Very soon we’ll be gearing up for the outreach campaign–planning events, arranging with our distribution partners to get the book into the hands of the people who need to read it, sending out press materials—to make sure all of our hard work pays off. As we say here at Watershed Media, “The work starts when the ink dries on the page.”

Wendell Berry Interview. Watershed Media co-founder, director and publisher Dan Imhoff wound up his 11-year stint as co-host of the Mendocino County Farm and Garden Show radio program with an interview with Wendell Berry. Listen to the interview. (mp3 audio file, 83mb, 1 hr).

Post Carbon Reader. In other book news, Watershed Media is set to publish The Post Carbon Reader: Making Sense of the 21st Century Sustainability Crises. Due out in October 2010, the book is a collaborative effort with the Post Carbon Institute, based in Sebastopol, California.

The Post Carbon Reader will feature articles by some of the world’s most provocative thinkers on the key drivers shaping this new century, from renewable energy and urban agriculture to social justice and systems resilience. This unprecedented collection takes a hard-nosed look at the interconnected threats of our global sustainability quandary—as well as the most promising responses.

Contributors include Bill McKibben, Wes Jackson, Stephanie Mills, David Orr, Michael Shuman, Gloria Flora, Peter Whybrow, and more than 20 others. We are sure that The Post Carbon Reader will become a valuable resource for policymakers, college classrooms, concerned citizens, and anyone concerned about a world with far less fossil fuels and converging environmental threats.

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Summer 2009

Visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta, Georgia). In April, Dan Imhoff joined Michael Pollan and a small team from Slow Food USA and the Georgia Organics for a special daylong conference at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. The CDC is methodically studying the food system from a broader view, with a firm understanding that the production of food is vital for the health and well being of society. The winds of change are rapidly sweeping across policy fronts as the nation begins to wake up to the inescapable reality that we can’t achieve personal health en masse without creating a healthy food and farming system. Our relationship with CDC is ongoing, as Dan Imhoff has been invited to participate in the CDC’s Conference on Obesity Prevention and Control on July 27-29 in Washington DC. Visit weightofthenation.org for details.

Beyond Growth (Pocantico Hills, New York).
“A great imperative Americans now face is to build a new economy: a sustaining economy. Sustaining people, communities and nature must henceforth be seen as the core goals of economic activity, not hoped for by-products of market success, growth for its own sake, and modest regulation.”
— Gus Speth, author of Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment

The Center for a New American Dream hosted a thought-provoking three-day conference entitled “Beyond Growth” in late May. At the request of one of our long-time funders, Dan Imhoff participated in this exciting and sober conversation, set amid the extraordinary grounds of the Rockefeller Pocantico Hills retreat center, with one eye out for a potential new book campaign. The conversation centered on ways to address the unassailable rationale of limitless growth that drives the global industrial economy, as well as on promising alternative models and economic structures that might help us avert ultimate eco-catastrophe.

New Board Member. We enthusiastically welcome Kaye Jones as our newest addition to the board! Kaye has an interdisciplinary background in sustainability, education and agriculture and received her MS from Schumacher College where her work was on ecological design with a focus on small-scale agriculture. She has farmed vegetables in the city of Portland for 47th Avenue Farm, and previously worked in ecological education and outdoor leadership. Kaye is a founding board member of the Westwind Stewardship Group, a non-profit promoting conservation, education and sustainability at Westwind, a wild 536-acre peninsula where the Salmon River meets the Pacific Ocean. She divides her time between California and Oregon with her husband Adam.

Grassroots Activism Among Youth: Sophomore in High School Conducts Semester-Long Project on Plastic Bag Pollution. Earlier in the year, Sydney McBride, of New Carlisle, IN, contacted Watershed Media in search of information about pollution caused by plastic bags. We immediately sent Sydney a stash of canvas bags and our book Paper or Plastic, which is full of information about the effects of plastic packaging on communities and the environment. All we asked was that she report back. Here’s an excerpt from her recent report:

“I just finished my sophomore year in high school. In my last semester my leadership teacher assigned a semester long “Service Learning Project”. It was to be more than a research paper we were asked to take action to get involved. I chose the environment, and this led me to plastic bag pollution. I was fascinated and horrified by the information I found. The North Pacific Gyre was definitely a shock to me and my classmates once I informed them. But I wanted to do like my teacher asked and get involved. I finally decided on a bag drive, it seemed like a simple idea that could make a big difference. So I arranged for a bag drive at school, it lasted one week, and I collected 645+ bags (which I counted by hand). All those bags came from my very small school community. I thought if I could collect 645+ bags from a community of 180 students and some faculty imagine what a whole town could do.”

 

Watershed Media Web Presence. Look for our new page on and follow us on where we will be posting more Watershed Media news!

New Interview. Listen to the Farm and Garden Radio Show: Dan Imhoff talks with author Rowan Jacobsen about his writing on food, the environment, and the connections between the two (mp3 audio file, 83.5MB, 1 hr).

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Winter 2009

Smart By Nature. Our joint book project with the Center for Ecoliteracy is in full production mode. The book, called Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability, will be an excellent resource for educators, parents, and policy-makers looking for ways to design classrooms, campuses, and lesson plans that inspire children to think sustainably. We’re delighted to be a part of this project — generously supported by the Compton Family Advisory Board and the Garfield Foundation. Check out the Center for Ecoliteracy for

CAFO Summit & The Animal Factory. In January, WM Director Dan Imhoff attended the National CAFO Summit in North Carolina. The event, organized by Waterkeeper Alliance, strengthened our resolve to spread the word about the devastating effects of animal factory farms. As our work on The Animal Factory book continues, we are more confident than ever that this resource will quickly become an invaluable tool for activists across the country. It combines tell-all reporting, provocative essays, and graphic photographs to paint a condemning picture of the American CAFO.

Events with Michael Pollan in Atlanta. Watershed Media director Dan Imhoff has been invited to participate in an event with Michael Pollan at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The discussion—held on March 20th in Atlanta—will explore CDC’s future actions to promote food system change for a healthier nation. Dan will also join Michael Pollan for Slow Food Atlanta’s “Slow Sustainable Spring Supper” on the same day. The supper, featuring a taste of the South, will showcase a star-studded cast of award-winning southern Slow Food chefs from all over the southeast. Slow Food is a non-profit organization founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food, where it comes from, how it tastes, and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.

Future of Food Series. Dan also recently delivered the final talk at the College of St. Scholastica’s “Future of Food” series. The series examines the complex food issues of hunger and obesity, safety, production and distribution, science and technology, politics, and economics. Thank you to all who joined us for this invigorating discussion.

Interviews. We have posted on our website an interview by WM director Dan Imhoff with Gary Paul Nabhan, renowned author and food and farming advocate. You won’t want to miss Dan and Gary’s conversation about the loss of agricultural diversity and its implications for our food system.

Listen to the interview of the Farm and Garden Radio Show: Gary Nabhan, Where Our Food Comes From, (mp3 audio file, 78MB, 1 hr).

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Fall 2008

Healthy Food Declaration. Dan Imhoff recently joined Roots of Change and a team of top-notch food and agriculture thinkers to write a Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture. Dan served as Originating Author and Primary Editor of the declaration, with an editing team of Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan and 13 activists around the country. After its release in a ceremony at Slow Food Nation on August 28 in the Rotunda of San Francisco’s City Hall, the document immediately made it into the national press cycle. The declaration is now the cornerstone of a campaign to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures—to be delivered, along with a set of policy recommendations, to policy makers in Washington in the Fall of 2009. Check out the declaration at fooddeclaration.org where individuals can

Recent Press:
Edible Portland, Fall 2008 issue, 9/13 ediblePolitics page, “Spark a Change - Four things you can do this election season to stir up the food debate - Vote with your Fork”

Washington Post, 8/29: “The 12 principles include providing access to affordable, nutritious food to everyone...” (read more)

New York Times, 8/31: “...the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture, which had a huge presence at the event...” (read more)

Water Consciousness Book. In the springtime we were approached by the San Francisco independent news organization, AlterNet, to design for them a book called Water Consciousness: How we All have to Change to Protect Our Most Critical Resource. It was a tight schedule—a month and a half to design and fine tune the book for the printer so it would be ready for a late August event that would kick off a year-long campaign on water consciousness. Hot off the press, this book is “a solution-focused guide to the world’s greatest environmental crisis.” The book’s writers include Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, and Brock Dolman. We anticipate this will be the beginning of many collaborative publishing projects.

New Office. In July, after 8 years in our previous space, we’ve moved into new digs in Healdsburg. We’re now in a renovated craftsman house, with a great yard and inspiring work spaces where we will continue our projects and meet with future partners, friends, and activists from around the world. We couldn’t be more fortunate.

CAFO Book. Work on CAFO: Confined Animal Feeding Operations continues. It’s a 400-page book on industrial animal food production, not for the weak of heart. It will feature full-page photographs, behind-the-scenes reporting on industrial animal farms, and essays by luminaries in the field. We’re not sure if it will be a Spring ’09 or Fall ’09 release, but we’re working to make it as fast as possible.

Farm Bill Work Continues. Our farm bill work never dies. Requests for talks and presentations continue, including a September plenary talk by Dan Imhoff at the Healthy Foods Local Farms Conference in Louisville, Kentucky and Natural Products Expo in Boston in October. In addition, Dan also attended the first meeting on a 50-year farm bill plan in Washington, D.C.. The 50-year plan is being spearheaded by Wes Jackson—and the first meeting brought together a small group of thinkers including Herman Daly, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Laura Jackson. This is just one of a number of policy oriented efforts designed to more directly confront the gap between policy and the on-the-ground challenges we face in our food and agriculture system.

Paula Crossfield spoke with Dan recently and asked him some questions about his work and his participation in Slow Food Nation. Read Part 1 of the interview, followed by Part 2.

Interviews. In August, Dan Imhoff interviewed two leading writers on the global food crisis:
Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved; and Vandana Shiva, renowned food and agriculture activist and author.

Listen to the interview with Raj Patel: Inforum/Commonwealth Club Radio Program (mp3 audio file, 29.2mb). Listen to the interview with Vandana Shiva: Soil Not Oil (mp3 audio file, 56 minutes).

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Spring 2008

We’ll Reap What We Sow. In early April, an editor from the Los Angeles Times approached Dan Imhoff to write an Op Ed on the progress of (what’s now called) the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008. It provided a great platform and an excellent opportunity to check back in on ongoing battles to finalize a bill between the House and Senate. The essay, We’ll Reap What We Sow, was immediately picked up by newspapers across the country.

Me and My Planet. In April, Dan Imhoff re-launched the Watershed Media blog, this time under a new name, “Me and My Planet.” Inspired by the readability, satire, and brevity of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s final essay collection, Man Without a Country, this online journal will feature concise pieces on wide ranging topics (mostly related to the environment and sustainability).

Farm Bill Events. Dan Imhoff was back on the road in May, for three events around Farm Bill issues. They coincided with the House and Senate passage of the Farm Bill—as well as President Bush’s veto and the subsequent override of the veto in both houses of Congress. The tour started with the two events sponsored by the Pickering Creek Audubon Center in Easton, Maryland on Tuesday, May 20th. This was followed up by an evening talk in St. Louis at the local eatery, The Companion.

Living on Earth. The syndicated National Public Radio program, Living on Earth, opened its May 24th show by interviewing Dan Imhoff on his perspectives on the latest Farm Bill. The show offered an excellent overview of how well conservation programs fared in this year’s Farm Bill negotiations. Check it out.

Water Consciousness Book Project. Roberto Carra is designing an exciting new book produced by AlterNet, the Bay Area web-based news organization. The book includes essays from many notable activists and writers, including Watershed Media Advisory Board member Bill McKibben, Brock Dolman, Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow, and Tony Clarke. The book launches in late summer and will serve as the focus of a year-long campaign

Emmett Hopkins Returns. Stanford University graduate and former Watershed Media intern Emmett Hopkins has returned for the summer to work for us on a variety of projects, and we couldn’t be happier. In addition to putting hours in at the studio, he is farming a one-acre market garden on his family’s farm south of Healdsburg.

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Winter 2008

Dan Imhoff wins 2008 EDDY Award. Dan Imhoff’s essay “Farm Bill 2007: A Citizen’s Guide,” first appeared in Edible Portland, one of 50 local food publications around the U.S. and Canada. By year’s end the essay was published in nearly all of the Edible Community’s publications around the United States as well as on websites, reaching tens of thousands of readers. (See www.ediblecommunities.com for more information on this great community of publishers.) “Best Column (National focus/Edible Nation) for the 2008 EDDY Awards. We are thrilled with the honor.

Eco Packaging Workshops. Dan Imhoff will be at the Anaheim Natural Foods Expo on March 13th moderating two half-day sessions on packaging solutions for the natural foods industry. The Produce-AM session, organized by Natalie Reitman-White and the Food Trade Sustainability Leadership Initiative, will focus on solutions for produce packaging. The Grocery-PM session, organized by Tom Wright of Sustainable Business Solutions, will focus on packaging for cereal, grains, and snacks. Both workshops are cosponsored by Whole Foods.

Watershed Media to introduce new advisory council. In late 2007, we reached out to some of our long-time supporters and backers and established a top notch Advisory Board. They include:

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Fall 2007

Three New Book Campaigns. This fall we’ve set three new projects in motion that we expect to launch in Spring 2009. (A fourth may soon be added.) Thanks to a two-year capacity building grant from one of our most loyal supporters, the Garfield Foundation, we’re planning a steady increase in the number of projects we manage at a given time. Using our experience from six book and outreach campaigns, we are joining forces with other outstanding organizations and individuals to produce some very exciting and worthy projects.

Eco Schools. This is being spearheaded by the Berkeley, California-based Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) and published by Watershed Media. Eco Schools will address the urgent need for an inspirational and instructive tool to infuse environmental awareness in every phase of K through 12 school design and administration. Author Mike Stone is currently scouring the country for outstanding examples of eco school development in a variety of categories: campus and grounds; curriculum; cafeterias, school gardens, and nutrition programs; community engagement. Watershed Media was recently awarded a grant from the Compton Family Advisory Board to help complete this project — a new and valued supporter of our work.

Animal Factory Farms. We were approached by the Foundation for Deep Ecology to complete a sister project to the largely influential Fatal Harvest book and outreach campaign. This book, which includes both a large format, photo-driven, volume and an affordable companion reader, takes on a grim topic: industrial animal confinement agriculture. Despite the enormous popularity and success of books such as Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Animal Liberation, which expose the brutality of large-scale animal production, the factory farm continues to dominate U.S. meat, dairy, and egg industries. Look for this book to take on the ethical, environmental, health, economic, climatic, and social aspects of treating domestic livestock as protein machines. We won’t be mincing words or sparing the graphic details.

The Food Chain Reader. We’ve informally joined forces with best-selling author and University of California journalism professor Michael Pollan on yet another new book project. (He has already contributed to our last two Watershed Media publications, Food Fight and Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature.) The Food Chain Reader (working title) will be geared toward the growing number of university classes around the country that focus on the many aspects of food production and agriculture — for which no adequate text currently exists. Michael Pollan teaches one such class himself. We’re shooting for a collection that will be both contemporary and timeless, one that can increase the national literacy around the importance of food production and which could also inspire a whole new generation of food journalism, business reporting, and research in geography, nutritional ecology, and other important disciplines.

Other News. The CBS Sunday Morning program, “Talking Trash,” on plastic packaging which featured an interview with Dan Imhoff has been nominated for an Emmy Award.  The Farm Bill has become front page news and op ed material for major newspapers across the country, with Food Fight helping to lead that charge. Onward!

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Summer 2007

 

Watershed Media’s Food Fight 2007 Farm Bill Outreach Campaign kicked into high gear in July. A front-page San Francisco Chronicle article — “The New Food Crusade” by Carol Ness — featured Food Fight as a beacon in the movement for Farm Bill reform. This outstanding article traveled quickly around the internet, giving a much needed jolt to an already inspired campaign.

Next, we unveiled our “Vote with Your Fork” campaign. This evolves around a great graphic design that’s being printed on T-shirts and post cards and being made available to organizations who want to replicate and distribute cards to their constituencies. Also included in the outreach materials are easy-to-follow instructions for contacting representatives, learning more about the Farm Bill, and setting up information tables at some of the more than 4,000 farmers markets throughout the country. Buy "Vote with your Fork" T-shirt Now!

As Representative Colin Peterson unveiled his blueprint for what can only be described as a reform-lite, pro-agribusiness Farm Bill, H.R. 2419, Dan Imhoff hit the road during the third week of July. There were three consecutive days in California: at the Patagonia Outlet in Santa Cruz; at the Santa Barbara Public Library; and at Stone Brewery in Oceanside. Meanwhile, reform groups were valiantly fighting for under-funded conservation and nutrition programs as negotiations in the House escalated.

Dan Imhoff then traveled to the East Coast for five more Farm Bill literacy building events: at the Westport Theater in Westport, Connecticut with former agriculture official Gus Schumacher, chef Michel Nischan, and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT); at the New York University Library with Dan Barber and Clark Wolf; at the Community Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with a panel of local activists; at Vermont Law School with author and global warming activist Bill McKibben; and at the Stone Barns Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Pocantico Hills with Dan Barber and Clark Wolf.

On July 27, Democrats in the House of Representatives approved a Farm Bill that — if passed in its current form — would continue to give handouts to multi-millionaire farm corporations. That same afternoon, Dan Imhoff and Bill McKibben engaged in a two-hour conversation at the Vermont Law School about the importance of redirecting national spending toward regional economies, beginning with food production. So the 2007 Farm Bill Food Fight is now half over. (Commodity agribusiness 1, the Tax Payers 0.) The Senate is now expected to debate its own version of the Farm Bill in September. Any hopes of a food and farm legislation with a heavy emphasis on conservation, sustainability, and family farm values now lie in the hands of the Senate Agriculture Committee chaired by Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). Tune in to www.farmpolicy.com for daily updates on the twists and turns of ongoing Farm Bill negotiations. 

It’s not too late to contact your senators or to turn up the heat and Vote with Your Forks!

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Spring 2007

Food Fight 2007 Farm Bill Outreach Campaign. It’s been an action-packed Spring. Although we had our hunches that the Farm Bill would be a popular topic when we took the leap on this project, it’s hard to believe the wave we’ve been riding since the launch of Food Fight in February. Large capacity crowds have turned out at exciting venues in Oregon, California, Arizona, and Washington D.C.. These have included:

• a Farm Bill teach-in featuring Michael Pollan, Ann Cooper, Ken Cook, George Naylor, Carlos Marentes and Dan Imhoff at the University of California Berkeley’s Wheeler Auditorium (view webcast, 1hr 52mins);
• a Food Fight community forum with Dr. Andrew Weil and others at Pima College in Tucson;
• a city-wide event in San Diego at the University of Arizona College of Medicine’s Program in Integrated Medicine’s annual conference with Dr. Andrew Weil, Michael Pollan, Dr. David Wallinga, and Dan Imhoff.

Across the United States, Slow Food chapters have rallied around the Farm Bill issue and organized events in Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, San Diego, Washington D.C., Albuquerque, Tucson, and Santa Fe — to name just a few. Check the Watershed Media calendar for events near you in the next few months.

Dan Imhoff is reaching millions of listeners through a radio campaign that’s included 40 interviews between February and early June. These have been on big and small market shows, late night and commuter talk programs, solo interviews and panel discussions, AM, FM, satellite, syndicated public affairs beats, webcasts, and podcasts. Thanks to our very effective publicist, Kathlene Carney, we expect dozens more interviews as the September 30 reauthorization deadlines grows near.

FOOD NEWS: The Farm Bill. This is an extended conversation with Dan Imhoff, about the importance of the federal Farm Bill legislation, and its effect historically upon our national food production, and public health.

Print coverage of Food Fight is also catching up with the 2007 Farm Bill debate. Time Magazine devoted nearly half a page to the “Farm Bill Food Fight” in the Dashboard section of their “Report Card on No Child Left Behind” issue (June 4, 2007). Reviews have appeared in Body + Soul, Mother Earth News, the Santa Fe New Mexican, and on over a dozen blog and web sites. Dan Imhoff’s overview article on why the Farm Bill matters has appeared in the high-quality Edible Communities publications from Sacramento to the Chesapeake Bay to Santa Fe. The May 20, 2007 Sunday San Jose Mercury News devoted two full pages to “Fat Food Nation: How Farm Policy Affects our Health.”

Watershed Media has also been extremely fortunate to have attracted a number of first-time funders to support this campaign: Nancy Schaub, Marjorie Roswell, the Lawrence Levine Foundation, the Levinson Foundation, and Roll International. We are so grateful for their support.

Paper or Plastic has also been in the news. With the announcement by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to require all plastic bags to be compostable, (along with the city of Leaf Rapids, Manitoba’s outright ban on plastic bags and the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors decision to take up a study) the issue of single-use disposable packaging is also gaining some traction. Don’t worry, we won’t say we told you so. Check our Recent Articles section for timely articles.

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