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The widely criticized House version of the 2018 Farm Bill, HR2, narrowly passed in the House late last week. This version of the bill fails to invest in sustainable farming or rural and urban communities across the country. A better (but still flawed) version of the Farm Bill is expected to be taken up in the Senate this week.

Last month, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) published results from their annual survey of managed honey bee colony losses in the United States. With the combination of increased overall pathogen load, poor nutrition, habitat loss and pesticide exposure all contributing to bee declines, the results were — unsurprisingly — not comforting.

This interview with Churdan, Iowa farmer Patti Naylor is the second blog in our series focusing on key issues of concern in the Farm Bill to those in our network. In this blog, Patti focuses on her vision for a Farm Bill process that better serves her farm and community. Many provisions in the Farm Bill legislation introduced in the House of Representatives will be harmful to farmers, rural communities, workers and the environment. Meanwhile, debates on the federal legislation are moving full steam ahead.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp, has been labeled by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer as a “probable human carcinogen.” Given the probable impacts of glyphosate on humans it isn’t a stretch to think that it would also be toxic to soil biology, right?

Last year, the dicamba drift crisis defined the growing season across the U.S. — damaging an estimated 3.6 million acres of crops. In the months following, PAN, farmers and partner organizations have been taking action and tracking options for how best to avoid another catastrophic dicamba experience in 2018.