Word: farm
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...company goes to China to play watchdog, but that role is getting more important--and much more difficult--as the U.S. depends increasingly on China for what it eats. Manufacturing powered China's economic revolution, and the Chinese government is pushing hard for farming to follow suit. The Communist Party wants to keep the countryside from falling too far behind the booming coastal cities. One answer is the farm sector, which generated $31 billion worth of exports last year, up from $13 billion...
John Peterson knows a thing or two about the struggles of the family farm. After losing his northern Illinois farm, and a sizeble majority of his land, in the 1980s due to a combination of skyrocketing interest rates, mounting bank loans and underperforming crops, Peterson was poised years later to fail a second time as he tried to farm his remaining acreage. But in the early '90s, he found salvation in an unlikely place: a small but passionate group of environmentally minded Chicago shoppers who happened to be on the hunt for a rural farmer rich in organic produce...
...Seeing the name of Peterson's farm on the underside of an onion in the grocery store, the group made him an unusual business proposal: For a set rate, these Chicagoans would fund Peterson's operation, and in exchange, he would keep them stocked with fresh food through the harvest season. Within a few years, Peterson was not only back on his feet, but had attracted hundreds of interested shareholders, all intent on saving his farm...
...highlights the success of community-supported agriculture (CSA), the concept those Chicagoans originally brought to Peterson. "My wife and I had just returned from Burlington, Vermont," recalls Bob Scheffler, who helped organize the Chicago CSA group, "and somehow our friends out there had stumbled on a small, three-acre farm just outside of town run by a commuter farmer. He lived in an apartment in town, left his tractor chained to a tree and he would bring food into town. So he was farming this plot for a bunch of people in town. Everyone seemed so happy with the arrangement...
Like major league teams with their farm system, comedies offer a chance for young talent to move up. Vaughn provided comedy relief for nearly a decade before his breakthrough with Wilson in Wedding Crashers. Rogen was one of Carell's buddies in The 40 Year Old Virgin; in Knocked Up, he had his own posse, and one of that group, Jonah Hill, will star this fall in the Rogen-written Superbad with Michael Cera, who's the male lead in the just wrapped Juno. John C. Reilly, Ferrell's foil in Talladega Nights and the forthcoming Step Brothers, gets...