Tag Archives: Marketing

John Quarterman on the Withlachoochee (audio)

Back at the end of March at a river conference in Roswell, Georgia, I was interviewed for a podcast. Here’s the audio, and here’s the blurb they included:

John Quarterman on the Withlachoochee
Monday, July 9th, 2012

John S. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.

NPS talks with Quarterman and his observations on starting and strengthening a Withlachoochee Riverkeeper organization at Georgia River Network‘s 2012 Weekend for Rivers.

The water organization has since been incorporated as the Georgia non-profit WWALS Watershed Coalition:

WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.

-jsq

PS: They also recorded another podcast which starts out on what may sound like a completely different topic, but which is actually quite related.

Monsanto under investigation by at least 7 US States

According to The Organic and Non-GMO Report, April 2010 :
At least seven US state attorneys general are investigating whether Monsanto Company has abused its market power to lock out competitors and raise prices on seed. Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and two other unidentified states are in a working group to investigate the biotech giant.

The states are probing whether Monsanto violated laws by offering rebates to seed distributors for excluding rival seeds, imposing limits on combining the product with other genetic modifications, or offering cash incentives to switch farmers to more expensive generation of seed varieties.

The state investigations add to pressure on Monsanto. The US Justice Department is investigating the company’s marketing practices, and DuPont Company has accused Monsanto of anti-competitive practices in licensing litigation.

And Monsanto’s stock price is down more than 30%, from $93.35 in May to a 52 week low of $63.75 Friday.

Interesting developments.

School Food: How to Change It

The hardest part of what Jamie Oliver wants to do to fix how we eat is to reform school food. Fortunately, there’s somebody already doing it: Ann Cooper already showed us how she does that three years ago:

Well, the CDC has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country’s history to die at a younger age than their parents, and it’s because of what we feed them.
And who teaches us to feed them that?
Big companies spent twenty billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids…. They spent 500 dollars marketing foods kids shouldn’t eat for every one dollar marketing healthy nutritious food.
She feeds school children in Berkeley. You might think that would be easy, but when she started, it was just as bad as anywhere else:
…extremo burritos, corn dogs, pizza pockets, grilled cheese sandwiches, everything came in plastic, in cardboard, the only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter; the only working piece of equipment a can crusher.
So she set out to fix it, and did. And if she can, we can.