red delicious apples, Texas pink grapefruit, navel oranges, and winter pears can be purchased from any music dept. Annual fruit sale is under way. Billingsgazette.com encourages readers to engage in civil conversation with their neighbors. Comments that are submitted go into a queue to be moderated and may take several hours to be reviewed. Funds will go for tours, music, instruments and equipment. The Billings Senior High Music Deptartment is conducting its annual fruit sale. Orders must...

The price and quality of the sweet fruit are up, and the farmers are happy that a new storage facility has extended their selling season. The advances in the pomegranate trade are a sliver of good news from a region of Afghanistan known more for Taliban attacks and a thriving opium trade. Ubaidullah Jan, a 50-year-old farmer from the Arghandab area just north of Kandahar, said the price his pomegranates command has doubled this year to about 54 cents a pound, due to the new cold storage...

As long as applicants have good outlines for production and trading projects, they stand a good chance of receiving funds that may even exceed regulated loan caps to help new businesses such as breeding farms. Struggling to survive, they had to use all their savings to plant cassava, corn and beans to barely keep themselves fed. Khanh says he can even set aside some money to put back into the fund in order to help other poor households escape from poverty. Khanh says he now grows different...

Foodies are consumers who take a serious interest in knowing where their food comes from, how it was produced, where it was produced, how far it traveled, who harvested it and who processed it. Adam Moody, who operates butcher shops in Avon, Ladoga and Indianapolis, said after hearing Keener's talk that he didn't expect mainstream entities like Purdue and the state Department of Agriculture to side with sustainable farming or organic farming as being "the way to go" or healthier. Keener...

Agriculture not only provides the bountiful array of fresh vegetables, fruits and meat we are all accustomed to, but it also provides us with a working landscape beyond compare. We can thank the generations of farmers, ranchers and the organizations that represent them for the hard work and tenacity it takes to remain in agriculture today. Empty sets of trailers with their fiberglass tubs began appearing along the driveway waiting to transport the golden Chardonnay fruit to its final...

template_bas template_bas It would have launched a school lunch nutrition program and invested in California's chief crops: fruits, nuts and vegetables. By Nicole Gaouette, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer November 17, 2007 WASHINGTON -- A drive to revamp the nation's costly farm subsidies died Friday in the Senate, leaving in place a system widely criticized for being out of step with the modern agriculture economy, for favoring crops with minimal nutritional value and for funneling large...