Climate Food and Agriculture

All Stories

  • For first time, GM soybeans may be losing favor among farmers

    A soybean field in summer. Farmers are getting fed up with Monsanto’s soy seed monopoly. UPDATE: This report refers not to the current year but to the 2009 crop year, which according to the USDA did see a slight drop in US GMO soybean plantings, as predicted. New estimates on the 2010 crop year should […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • Are you a farmer at heart? Start a ‘Crop Mob’

    Carbon sequestration: Crop Mob stalwarts Rob Jones, left, and Chris Rumbley create a hügelkultur bed at “the Bog” co-housing community in Carrboro, N.C., summer 2009. Photo: Tom PhilpottA growing number of young people are finishing college and resisting the pressure to plunk down in a cube behind a computer. Others skip college altogether–given the spiraling […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Smithfield tries to weave a silk purse from a sow’s ear

    “Just this week I promoted somebody–and I can’t even believe I’m saying this word here, folks–to a chief sustainability officer.”—Larry Pope, CEO of Smithfield Foods, speaking before the North Carolina Agribusiness Council. Smithfield’s environmental record was nicely documented in the classic 2006 Rolling Stone article “Boss Hog.”

    Tom Philpott Food

  • New research: synthetic nitrogen destroys soil carbon, undermines soil health

    Just precisely what does all of that nitrogen ferilizer do to the soil?“Fertilizer is good for the father and bad for the sons.”–Dutch saying For all of its ecological baggage, synthetic nitrogen does one good deed for the environment: it helps build carbon in soil. At least, that’s what scientists have assumed for decades. If […]

    Tom Philpott Climate & Energy

  • Katie Couric chews the food-system fat

    In “Chewing the Scenery,” we round up interesting food-related video from around the Web. ——— Obesity, it seems, is the popular frame for looking critically of the food system: it’s the respectable pathway through which public figures can criticize industrial food. I wish there were another one. While the expansion of the American waistline is […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • More biofuel waste for cows, plus a California beef packer pulls a Toyota

    What the hell are you feeding us?In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ————- Agricultural societies, I imagine, have always fed waste products to livestock. On diversified farms, pigs and chickens get lots of kitchen scraps and “culls”–produce that can’t be sold. And it’s worthwhile to keep […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Still another critic of real food – this time in the NYT

    In Sunday’s New York Times, Damon Darlin has now weighed into a debate which I am suddenly making a career of noticing, that of publicly lambasting locavores. Normally a tech writer (and perhaps better suited to it), Darlin has wheeled out some of the same tired points that others have recently, making them officially clichéd. […]

    Kurt Michael Friese Food

  • Me, babbling on the radio about ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’

    You read the first post; then you read the second post. But admit it: you still haven’t heard enough about why I think you should see Fantastic Mr. Fox, and why the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the academy were putzes for stiffing it on a best picture nomination. So now you will listen to […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Can Michelle Obama make the math work for better school food?

    Launching her anti-obesity campaign — “Let’s Move” — last week, First Lady Michelle Obama vowed to add 1 million kids to the 31 million already being served daily by federal reimbursable meal programs while cutting back on the foods kids like most — refined grains, potatoes, sugar, salt — and adding things kids like least — vegetables and […]

    Ed Bruske Food

  • USDA releases strict new pasture rules for organic dairy

    In October 2008, the USDA proposed changes to the standards that govern organic dairy farming. Before, organic certification required farmers to give their cows “access to pasture,” which some large dairies chose to interpret, well, rather loosely. How now, organic cow? On Friday, the agency released its final rules on the matter. Pasture standards for […]

    Tom Philpott Food