Climate Food and Agriculture

Tsunami disaster site rehabilitated as robot farm

The Japanese government is reclaiming land flooded by the March 2011 tsunami and turning it into what Wired calls a "robot-run super farm." The Ministry of Agriculture has claimed a 600-acre site, part of thousands of acres of farmland destroyed by the tsunami and its aftereffects, for its "Dream Project" — a farm tilled by […]

Bourbon of proof: Is Kentucky’s heritage spirit compromised by GMO corn?

As an American, corn-based spirit, bourbon has changed rapidly in recent decades. Now, the question is: How long do we have until it's all made with genetically engineered grain?

FDA regulates 0.3 percent of antibiotics in livestock

So if you were the FDA, and you wanted to regulate the feeding of antibiotics to livestock -- which you don't, but bear with me -- there would be a couple of ways you could go. You could regulate the ones that are the most widespread and cause the most problems. Or you could regulate the ones that a tiny and decreasing number of people use in the first place. The second one is less effective, but it's easier! So that's what the FDA is doing.

The agency has announced that it will ban the agricultural use of cephalosporins, a class of antibiotic used in humans to treat pneumonia and certain infections. That's a good step towards keeping factory farms from becoming breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant microbes -- or anyway, it would be, if it weren't for the fact that effectively zero percent of farms use cephalosporins in the first place.

The birds and the weeds: A farm conservation love story

A recent study shows that weeds on farms are crucial to keeping birds and other wildlife alive.

What the Times’ organic tomato story missed: Golf courses

Farming organic winter tomatoes in Mexico definitely has its problems, but Del Cabo's Larry Jacobs says water isn't one of them.

Mountain Dew can dissolve a mouse, says Pepsi

An Illinois man is suing Pepsi Co. because, he says, he found a mouse in his can of Mountain Dew. But Pepsi says the guy is pulling a Strange Brew, and here's how they know: If there really were a mouse in a Mountain Dew can, it would have dissolved into "a jelly-like substance" before the guy could find it. Seriously, this is their defense.

Greasy to gourmet: Seattle chefs help schools trade corn dogs for couscous

With the help of local chefs, the Seattle School District makes school lunches healthier by scaling up examples set in smaller towns like Berkeley.

Is your all-you-can-eat shrimp killing the mangroves?

Kennedy Warne, author of Let Them Eat Shrimp, discusses the connection between shrimp farming and the disappearance of some of the most biologically productive ecosystems on Earth.

Organic food is not always sustainable food

Good food, as we've come to know it in that last few years, has a few characteristics: It's local. It's grown using responsible, land-loving techniques, like crop rotations and polycultures. And it's organic, raised without chemical fertilizers and poison pesticides. At one point, “organic” was shorthand for all of that, because the same people who cared enough to grow their vegetables with manure cared about environmental sustainability and tended to be local.

But now “organic” can be shorthand only for adherence to a certain set of rules that outlaw certain concentrations of certain types of fertilizers and pesticides, and as the New York Times points out, it sometimes doesn't mean much else.

Doe, a deer, a sustainable protein source to last all winter

I am not a hunter. I don’t (and will not) own a gun and, though I’ve toyed with the idea of bow hunting in the past, my aim really stinks. Even so, the deer population where I live does need to be thinned, since we’ve taken their natural predators away. And I sure do appreciate […]