Climate Food and Agriculture

All Stories

  • The bees

    (thanks LL!)

    David Roberts Food

  • Demand for food, wood, biofuels driving tropical deforestation, report says

    Demand for food, wood, and biofuels will likely contribute to massive deforestation in developing countries around the world by 2030, according to a new report. The Rights and Resources Initiative estimates that if current agricultural land productivity doesn’t increase substantially, by 2030 about 1.2 billion additional acres of land will be needed to meet the […]

    Grist staff Food

  • The toll of agriculture and hundred-year rains on Wisconsin’s farmland

    We are, for better or worse, part of the land we live on. We can choose to extract as much as possible from the earth around us, the "Manifest Destiny" (or nature's in my way) line of thinking. Or we can take as little as necessary and leave as small a trace as possible, the "Seventh Generation" concept of the Native American peoples. If farming well were easy and profitable, everyone would be doing it. Farming is never easy, no matter how you go about it, but at least when we farm with nature it's not a 24/7 battle.

    Jim Goodman Food

  • EPA cracks down on the pesticides on your peppers

    The U.S. EPA plans to tighten restrictions on five nasty soil fumigants that keep pests away from strawberries, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and peppers. The proposed mitigation measures include buffer zones, warning signs, air-quality monitoring, management and outreach plans, emergency-response training, and provision of breathing masks for farmworkers. The rules would apply to five scary-sounding ‘cides: […]

    Grist staff Food

  • Drought grips Iraq, threatening crops and water supplies

    On top of Iraq’s myriad other problems, drought has hit the country hard recently, impacting crops and water supplies in many regions. Rainfall this winter was about 40 percent lower than usual in Iraq and Turkey, and as a result, the Tigris River near Baghdad is at its lowest level since 2001. In the country’s […]

    Grist staff Food

  • USDA pessimistic on hunger outlook

    In 2006, the U.S. Department of Agriculture calculated that 849 million people across the globe were “food-insecure” — consuming less than 2,100 calories a day, or, in a word, hungry. But in its 2006 Food Security Report, the agency took an optimistic view of the situation, suggesting that the number of malnourished would fall to […]

    Grist staff Food

  • Conservation land in flood zone opened to grazing

    Livestock grazing will be allowed on thousands of acres of Midwest land that had been set aside for conservation, Department of Agriculture Secretary Ed Schaeffer announced this week. Under the federal Conservation Reserve Program, landowners are paid to let their acreage just chill out and be wildlife habitat. But after the region’s recent spate of […]

    Grist staff Food

  • Atlantic Salmon restoration efforts face grim realities

    Stocks of wild salmon in the North Pacific are in trouble. That's news.

    What isn't news is that the spring has passed us by in Massachusetts again without returning more than a handful of wild Atlantic Salmon. The river closest to me, the Connecticut, saw just 132 salmon return, nearly all of which were captured at either of two dams and whisked away by biologists working for the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Restoration program. The fish are bred at hatcheries so next spring the young can be released back into the river, hopefully to grow, go to sea, and return (others were tagged and released upstream of the dams to breed naturally this fall). But is it worth the effort?

    Erik Hoffner Food

  • The unshelled story on the nutty side of our food supply

    This post marks the launch of our new food-advice column Checkout Line, by talented, funny, and food-obsessed Lou Bendrick. Ever get confused in the supermarket, wondering which “all-natural” label is legit? Ever wonder what you’d actually say to a farmer at a farmers market, or whether organic is better than local, or how you can […]

    Lou Bendrick Food

  • Economist says biofuels have pushed up global food prices by 75 percent

    The “Republican war on science” has evidently opened a new front: economics, a discipline often fetishized by the right. In a startling article published July 4, the Guardian reports that in a "secret" study, a World Bank senior economist concluded that the recent explosion in biofuels use has driven global food prices up by 75 […]

    Tom Philpott Food