From the outbox of Meyer’s inbox:

Is beef what’s for dinner tonight in your house? For millions of Americans that answer is a resounding “Yes.” But before they bite into that steak or hamburger or meatloaf how many of those same folks take the time to wonder where that beef came from? Sadly, not many. Right now some cattle ranchers in Texas are dealing with a tough hand dealt by Mother Nature in the form of a serious drought. This has caused whole herds to be sold off before their prime and forced other cattlemen to move their herds to greener passage. This epic dry spell hasn’t caused a significant interruption of our food chain (yet) but that doesn’t mean these ranchers aren’t suffering. Consider their plight as reported in this article from MSNBC.

THE GREAT MIGRATION: TEXAS CATTLE HEADING NORTH

By P.J. Huffstutter and Theopolis Waters reporting for Reuters

For more than a century, through a dozen dry spells when lakes disappeared and the land died, thousands of cows from the Swenson Land & Cattle Co have roamed the fields of Texas. Read More...

Putting the science based catch limits of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act  over political interests has helped efforts to attempt to maintain healthy fish populations.

Putting Fish Over Politics

By Lee Crocket – Director, Federal Fisheries Policy, Pew Environmental Group
Huffington Post - GREEN

For the five-year anniversary of the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the law that addresses fisheries in the U.S., I collaborated on this op-ed with former National Marine Fisheries Service director Bill Hogarth. He currently directs the Florida Institute of Oceanography. Read More...

The last time I was in Indianapolis was the summer of 2003. I remember it pretty well because I was still sulking about The Colts being moved there without my permission and not quite over their inglorious departure from my hometown of Baltimore twenty years earlier. My bitterness melted away however in nearby Plainfield at The National Chimney Sweep Training School, the site of my very first Dirty Job. There, I was instructed in the fine art of “flue maintenance,” and engulfed in flames while attempting to extinguish a raging creosote fire from the top of a rickety demonstration platform. Things went downhill after that and by the time I finally left town I was unrecognizable, concealed under a thick layer of ash and soot, with no plans of ever returning to The Crossroads of America.

Of course, in those days I was unrecognizable on a daily basis. Dirty Jobs would not debut for another six months, and I had no reason to think that anyone would watch when it did. I was wrong about that, and I’ve been wrong about a great many things ever since. A few months ago in fact - proving once again that my plans and my life have little in common – I returned to Indianapolis a lot cleaner, and a lot less anonymous, to deliver the keynote address at The 82nd National Convention of The Future Farmers of America (10/21/09).

For those of you who don’t know, The FFA is an organization of 500,000 teenagers, most of who look like they fell off the front of a Wheaties box. Wholesome, polite, and impossibly well mannered, these are the kids you wish you had, diligently pursuing an adolescence of agricultural acumen. Unfortunately, I arrived at their annual convention with the same level of planning and forethought I brought on my last visit, (i.e., none,) and found myself pacing in the wings twenty minutes before my appearance, trying to arrange my thoughts into an “inspirational and G-Rated message.” Luckily, I happened to glance down at the “FFA Briefing Packet,” recently handed to me by one of the organizers, and found some inspiration on page 4. Read More...