The Justice Department announced in August that it planned to investigate various parts of the agriculture industry to determine if there were violations of antitrust laws. The DOJ made the pledge at the annual meeting of the Organization for Competitive Markets. (Story here, picture above.)  The federal officials said the investigation would begin with a series of workshops where the government could collect stories and evidence.

The DOJ has announced the dates, places and subject matter for these hearings, and the sessions will last all of 2010. The first workshop will be held in Ankeny, Iowa, on March 12 and will cover "issues of concern to farmers." The next workshop will be in Normal, Alabama, on May 21 and will deal with the poultry industry (grower contracts and "concentration and buyer power"). The next workshop will cover the dairy industry and will be held June 7 in Madison, Wisconsin. The livestock industry (beef and hog) will be covered in a workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado, on August 26. 

The last workshop will be December 8 in Washington, D.C. "This workshop will look at the discrepancies between the prices received by farmers and the prices paid by consumers," according to the Justice Department. The Justice Department is also asking for comments prior to the workshops. To get details on the meetings and on how to comment, go here. 

Front page news around the country today that the percentage of households with low "food security" has risen from 11.1% in 2007 to 14.6% in 2008. Nearly 50 million people, including one in four children, struggled in '08 to get enough to eat. In about 6% of households "food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food." To see the Washington Post story, go here.  To see the U.S. Department of Agriculture study where these figures come from, go here. 

The percentage of households defined as "food insecure" varied by state. Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Georgia and New Mexico had the highest percentage of families having a hard time filling their plates. The most food secure states were North Dakota, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, Hawaii, Wyoming, Delaware and Maryland.

In a briefing for reporters, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, "These numbers are a wake-up call . . . for us to get very serious about food security and hunger, about nutrition and food safety in this country." Vilsack attributed the growth in food insecurity to rising unemployment.

Bloomberg's Jim Efstathiou Jr. writes about the threat the mayfly posses to mountaintop removal coal mining in the East. The Bloomberg reporter writes that applicants for new mines must show that they won't cause pollution that will adversely affect the mayfly. (Above.) Efstathiou writes: "That puts at risk about $3 billion a year in coal that operators led by Massey Energy Co. and International Coal Group Inc. extract in Appalachia, said Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners LLC. Without fresh permits to dump debris, mines may shut by 2012 in states such as West Virginia, he said. 

'The future of mountaintop mining looks bleak,' Book, who is based in Washington, said in an interview. 'Ripping off mountaintops gets cheap clean coal, but there’s no way to do it without environmental impacts.'"

Deepmining coal adds from $3 to $10 a ton to production costs. Mountaintop removal accounts for 6 percent of U.S. coal production. And ending mountaintop mining in Appalachia would remove 70 million tons a year from the market, increasing the demand for western coal. "More than 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) of creeks and streams have been buried by mining debris in Appalachia from surface-mining techniques, including mountaintop removal, the EPA said in 2005," Efstathiou wrote.

The EPA for the first time has held up mountaintop mining permits because of potential harm to the mayfly.

A vote in the Canadian parliament to repeal the registry of long guns (rifles) has set our northern neighbors into a cultural and geographic squabble that we thought could only happen in the States. The vote was 164 to 137 to remove the requirement that rifles be registered. (Hand guns would continue to be registered.) The vote out of the biggest cities was in favor of registry. In the rest of Canada, no way.

The vote created a "hysterical overreaction of urban newspaper columnists and editorial boards against rural Canadians," according to columnist Lorne Gunter. He continues: "Apparently, if my fellow commentators at other outlets are any gauge, this country’s urban elites believe that beyond the boundaries of their megalopolises there reside only people too stupid to move into more sophisticated boroughs. People who live outside Canada’s three biggest cities have been routinely portrayed in the past week as unthinking, knuckle-dragging, cousin-marrying rubes whose voices should not be heard in national debates, whose opinions should not be counted — unless, of course, they agree with their enlightened urban superiors." 

Sound familiar? The latest news from up north, however, is that most Canadians agree with the knuckle draggers. A Canadian Press/Harris Decima poll released Thursday found that 46% of Canadians believe abolishing the registry of long guns to be a good idea.  Gunter continues: "Here’s a flash for all the sneering, snotty urbanites: Maybe those people you so derisively call “rural” are right. Maybe because they have direct experience with guns, they know more about how to control them effectively than urbanites who know little about guns." These people could be U.S. citizens!!