Climate Food and Agriculture
All Stories
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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 […]
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Splendor in the grass at an Iowa activist’s dairy farm [VIDEO]
Last year, we created 52 episodes about sustainable and adventurous food in Minnesota. For the final episode of this past season, we announced our plans to take this web series on the road. And with this episode (No. 53!) we start a whole new round of weekly videos about real food across America. Traveling with my camerawoman […]
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What we know — and don’t know — about the safety of eating GMOs
GMOs ahead: Proceed at your own risk.Are genetically modified foods safe to eat? The conventional answer is “yes,” and it’s not hard to see why. Since their introduction in 1996, genetically modified (GM) or genetically engineered (GE) corn and soy seeds quickly conquered U.S. farm fields. Today, upwards of 70 percent of corn and 90 […]
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Big Ag doesn’t want you to care about pesticides
Power to the people pesticide industry!The produce lobby is livid that consumers might be concerned about pesticides. They are taking their fury out on the USDA for its annual report on pesticide use (via The Washington Post): In a recent letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, 18 produce trade associations complained that the data have […]
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Produce industry wants Americans to eat their pesticide-laden veggies
For years, the Environmental Working Group has warned consumers away from "The Dirty Dozen," the 12 fruits and vegetables that contain the most trace pesticides. But the produce industry has had enough of this anti-vegetable propaganda! A consortium of food groups, from the American Mushroom Institute to the National Watermelon Association Inc., is mounting a […]
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Critical List: The Mississippi River, unleashed; ‘The Dirty Dozen’ list under attack
The mighty Mississippi just can't be held down. This weekend, the Army Corps of Engineers opened four gates to the Morganza Spillway, which hasn't been used since 1973. Corps officials told residents: "Prepare for the worst. It's coming." President Obama said Saturday the administration would begin auctioning oil and gas leases in the Alaska National […]
