This article is part of an ongoing Friday series about the vendors at the Lafayette Farmers Market.
In 1770, Jean Francios de Beaumelle Gonsoulin, a land surveyor for the King of France, registered his brand in St. Martin Parish.
More than 250 years later, Francios descendant Shannon Gonsoulin has maintained the namesake with Gonsoulin Land and Cattle Company.
A staple at the Lafayette Farmers Market, the New Iberia-based meat company boasts a long lineage of butchers, meat market operators and, most recently, a grass-fed cattle ranch.
Back to basics: raising cattle as nature intended
In 2005, Gonsoulin, a veterinarian, started hearing about natural and organic products gaining speed. He had cattle at the time and saw the niche market as a way to improve the ranch.
Funding for Agricultural Conservation Programs Essential to Moving Country to Net-Zero Emissions Share Donate
Funding for Agricultural Conservation Programs Essential to Moving Country to Net-Zero Emissions
Mike Saccone
Apr 28, 2021
WASHINGTON, D.C. A broad coalition of 133 conservation, farmer and rancher, sportsmen, and wildlife groups urged the leadership of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate agriculture committees in a letter to ensure the forthcoming infrastructure package includes robust funding for Farm Bill conservation programs and farmer assistance. They specifically urged Congress to double the investment in Farm Bill conservation programs and to ramp up conservation technical assistance funding.
“Increasing baseline funding for the Farm Bill conservation programs and ramping up conservation technical assistance on the ground will enable landowners to mitigate the impacts of drought and flood, improve habitat, improve soil health and long-term food secur
Farmer Bill and the Great Reset
While many media outlets claim this makes Gates the biggest farmland owner in the U.S.,
1 that may be an exaggeration, seeing how there are at least 50 other families that own far greater landmasses, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
2 According to a USA Today investigation
3 published in November 2019, Bezos owns a respectable 420,000 acres, most of it located in Texas.
Is Bill Gates Too Powerful?
Either way, Gates certainly owns a sizeable chunk of U.S. farmland, which places him, yet again, in a position to have a significant impact on the direction of American agriculture and food production. In the video above, Russell Brand reviews some of these controversies.
.
Photo by Breanne Lywood
Whether you’re a fully-fledged rural homesteader, a sustainability-minded urbanite, or simply a curious consumer, you’ve probably heard bad things about how animals are raised on commercial farms. These things take many forms: a dramatic headline, a farm exposé video, or maybe a comment at a dinner party. What many criticisms of animal production have in common is that they fail to paint the full picture and, more importantly, they fail to offer real solutions.
I’m a student of animal biology. Outside the classroom, my journey through the animal husbandry trade has seen me doing everything from shoveling pungent manure out of a small pig barn to processing feather samples for hormone analysis in a lab. I’ve seen the flaws of the food animal industry firsthand, and it’s true that animals suffer to feed humans. For conscientious and compassionate people, is going vegan the only answer?
A diverse set of environmental, family farm, farm policy and rural community organizations sent a letter to the White House today urging the Biden administration to issue an executive order that would enact a moratorium on mergers and acquisitions in the food and agricultural industries.
The effort, led by Food & Water Watch, is meant to highlight the crisis of consolidation across the industry. The food system in the United States is heavily concentrated across all levels of the supply chain, with negative impacts on small farmers, industry workers, and consumers alike. Corporate consolidation has been accelerating since the 1980s, but particularly since the 2008 recession. Allowing additional food and agriculture mergers to proceed will only increase this consolidation which results in decreased income for farmers and higher grocery prices for consumers.