Colorado and U.S. agriculture news in brief for Feb. 5, 2021
Candace Krebs
Colorado Farmers Markets to host annual conference
The Colorado Farmers Market Association will hold its annual conference online March 5-6. Topics covered will include challenges and successes from 2020, game planning for 2021, farmers markets as business incubators and more. An equity and inclusion training will also be offered.
Online produce safety training offered
Colorado State University Extension, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, Colorado Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association and Colorado Department of Agriculture will host an online-only Produce Safety Alliance Grower Training Course in two parts, from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Feb. 25-26. This course provides a foundation on the FSMA Produce Safety Rule requirements, Good Agricultural Practices and co-management information, and details on how to develop a farm food safety plan. Registration is $35.
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.
To say that 2020 was a transformative year would be putting it mildly. The ongoing pandemic has prompted profound changes in the way we live, work and socialise, with prolonged social distancing measures meaning that many aspects of our lives have moved online in the past 12 months. Kitchen tables now double up as desk space, meetings have been replaced by Zoom calls and Friday night drinks take place over FaceTime, instead of at the pub. When it comes to how we spend our money, too, the pandemic has pushed us towards the digital realm.
When fears of the virus first began circulating in Europe in February 2020, cash quickly fell out of favour, despite studies indicating that currency doesn’t transmit COVID-19. Shoppers were encouraged to use contactless payments wherever they could, and in the UK alone, ATM usage fell by 71 percent between early March and mid-April. When heading out to the supermarket and other essential shops, we have been ditching the cash and relying on our
Smart meters boast a myriad of benefits for consumers, according to a recent paper by the R Street Institute [2] based in Washington, DC: “Leveraging Competitive Markets to Unlock the True Value of AMI.”
One potential benefit of AMI is lowering the existing cost of competitive supply. Costs to serve large commercial industrial (LCI) customers can vary significantly, so they are billed based on actual interval usage data; however, residential consumers often have their usage costs based on average data profiles rather than their own. Shifting away from fixed rates enables customers to respond to price signals. Research done by R Street [3] has found that residential consumers currently on competitive supply could save approximately $250 million per year under smart-meter rates.
Incoming Biden administration must act fast to prevent another SolarWinds cyber-attack and repair untold damage already done
While we do not yet know the extent of the damage done, the SolarWinds cyber-attack is a sobering reminder that bad actors are actively at work against the United States. Now more than ever, it is critical that we contain and remove all malware and secure our government networks. To do this, the federal government must ensure a coordinated and robust response, pulling resources from wherever necessary, including utilizing Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA), private sector collaboration, and sector-specific agency teams to quickly identify the depth and extent of the breach.