And Hitt says the tremendous boom in farmers markets in the past decade has helped his e and other small farms.
These include the single fastest-growing retail chain in any sector, Sprouts Farmers Market, which doubled in size in the past year.
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In the past, most protesters were farmers who fought for their land.
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Despite high borrowing costs, farmers have invested heavily over the past decade (partly because the state-owned banks have repeatedly rolled over farmers' debts, in response to pressure from the powerful rural lobby in Brazil's Congress).
In the past year, however, the provinces that usually absorb migrant farmers have become increasingly unable to do so, as the precipitous drop in orders for textiles and manufactured goods forces more and more factories that employ low-skilled migrant workers to shut down.
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But with frost claiming most of his apple crops in three out of the past five years, Graham was convinced that the Californian farmers had the answer.
In Peru's Huallaga valley over the past two decades the authorities have helped thousands of farmers to replace 81, 000 hectares of coca with alternatives such as coffee, cacao, rubber and oil palm.
Since 2004, stocks of companies that produce fertilizer for farmers produced head-spinning returns, but their free falls in just the past three months has been equally heart-stopping.
In the past few years, Brock and a small group of local historians, plant geneticists, and farmers have reintroduced dozens of heirloom greens and grains, many of them untasted since the eighteen-hundreds.
Wal-Mart still has just one distribution center in India, but having laid the groundwork over the past 2 years and established themselves favorably with the farmers, you can bet that their expansion plan throughout the massive nation is about to accelerate.
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