• The elephant in the room….

    ….or in Congress. Now that the dreaded farm bill….with billions for town and farm….has marched down the hill (as in Capitol) again….what next? Normally, the city legislators get behind the pork (with apologies to the guys out back in the woods) for farmers in exchange for easy sailing for their much-loved Food Stamps.  This time, however, at the last minute some cost-conscious folks upended the deal. Brian Snyder, the executive director of The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, was very involved in the early stages of the Farm bill negotiations and we were critical of his role.  We felt he had been lured in by the Big Boys to provide…

  • A split in the ranks….

    ….the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) is a major voice in the field and, through the efforts of its executive director Brian Snyder, increasingly a voice in Washington on national farm policy. We haven’t been entirely enthusiastic about the way our representative has represented those of us in the field but, since starting this blog, we’ve mostly stayed away from politics.  However,  it has seemed to us that Brian has been too willing to compromise on some important issues, such as the animal identification system, and we’ve wondered if he has succumbed to what we used to call “Potomac fever”.  That is, whether he has been carried away with the excitement over…