Climate Food and Agriculture
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How industrial agriculture makes us vulnerable to climate change, Mississippi floods edition
An “ephemeral gulley” that carried soil and agrichemicals from an Iowa farm toward the Gulf of Mexico during a 2010 storm. Photo: Environmental Working GroupNancy Rabalais, marine scientist and executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, is probably our foremost authority on the vast, oxygen-depleted “dead zone” that rears up annually in the Gulf […]
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Forget rice, think meat and yogurt: ‘Chinese food’ looking more and more like Western diet
Meating demand: Workers at an industrial meatpacking house in China try to keep up with their nation’s soaring appetite for animal products.Photo: Shreyans BhansaliIt’s Monday, which for many is now a meatless day, so it’s appropriate I think to highlight Howard Schneider’s Washington Post article on the long-anticipated Chinese meat-eating explosion: For China, the world’s […]
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Two percent of U.S. energy goes to wasted food
The U.S. wastes a stunning amount of food — 40 percent of what we produce, according to Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland. That’s way above the already-staggering global average of one third. That means that 40 percent of the energy, water, and fuel we put into farming goes straight into the trash. All in […]
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How the Feds saved enough water for a whole city with just a little bit of cash
The Department of the Interior's WaterSMART program will save enough water for a smallish city — 400,000 people — yet it cost only $24 million. As Tina Casey reports at CleanTechnica, the program works by going for the low-hanging fruit: 54 separate programs that address everything from farm irrigation to water distribution infrastructure. At $60 […]
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Not just the facts, ma’am: Why science alone can’t defeat Big Food’s policy stranglehold
Put ’em up, Pepsi.Food-reform advocates like to stick to the facts, believing that if they can just construct a rational, air-tight argument, they’ll convince the public and transform policy around food. But that’s a bit like bringing a butter knife to a sword fight. As Robert K. Ross, president and CEO of the California Endowment, […]
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Fracking with our food: how gas drilling affects farming
Photo: Gilt Taste This story originally appeared on Gilt Taste. There’s a stunning moment in the Academy Award-nominated documentary Gasland, where a man touches a match to his running faucet — to have it explode in a ball of fire. This is what hydraulic fracturing, a process of drilling for natural gas known as “fracking,” […]
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Want a better organic garden? Call out the soil-critter army
The helpful Jerusalem cricket.Photo: Franco FoliniCross-posted from Cool Green Science. There are 1 billion bacteria in a single gram of soil. (Give or take a few million.) But how can you get that army — and its insect friends, like the two-inch Jerusalem cricket pictured to the right — to help you grow bigger veggies […]
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Minneapolis to open 12 vacant lots to gardening
Minneapolis is opening up 12 vacant lots across the city to groups that will turn them into community gardens, because a lot strewn with tomatoes and strawberries sure beats one strewn with empty McDonald's cups. There's a long tradition of using empty space in cities for community gardens, and these programs can go wonky when […]
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California schemin’: How a fake organic fertilizer bamboozled farmers and watchdogs alike
What’s the difference?: What seemed like organic fertilizer to farmers could have been spiked with the synthetic kind.Truck photo (left): Iris Shreve Garrott It’s no secret that the organic food industry has seen explosive growth, taking only a mild drubbing through the recession and then continuing its ascent. At the heart of that growth has […]
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Another danger of non-organic farming: Exploding watermelons
People opt for organically-farmed food for all different reasons, but here's one of the more compelling ones we've seen: Agricultural chemicals can make watermelons explode. Chinese watermelon crops just had an unfortunate run-in with the growth accelerator forchlorfenuron, which makes plants' cells divide faster to pump up growth rates. Supposedly forchlorfenuron can bump up harvest […]
