agriculture
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Are we losing touch with good, simple things?
Years ago, when I went out to my new chicken house and found the very first freshly laid egg, I stared at it in awe. “How did that hen do that?” I wondered. She takes in grain and bugs and kitchen scraps and turns them into an egg. Shell on the outside, white and yolk […]
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Going Against the Grain
A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of farmers contends that the maker of the StarLink biotech corn variety was negligent in bringing the corn to market. StarLink was not approved for human consumption, but has been found to have made its way into the food stream, leading to a nationwide recall of millions of taco […]
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Consumers have the power to fight factory farms
According to the rules of the World Trade Organization, governments cannot block the import of a product on the basis of how it is produced. So what if a rainforest has been cut down or a stream polluted or an animal tortured or workers paid pitiful wages? That’s the concern of the producing country, not […]
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The world is running low on H2O
Droughts in the United States, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan have been big news this year — and even more serious water shortages are emerging as the demand for water in many areas of the world simply outruns the supply. Water tables are now falling on every continent. Literally scores of countries are facing water shortages. All […]
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Farmers are reaping rewards from wind energy
Farmers and ranchers in the United States are discovering that they own not only land, but also the wind rights that accompany it. A farmer in Iowa who leases a quarter acre of cropland to the local utility as a site for a wind turbine can typically earn $2,000 a year in royalties from the […]
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The Roquefort Files
José Bové milks 250 sheep in the Larzac region of France, a rocky, windswept place where you would think no farmer could produce anything. But Bové turns sheep milk into one of the gastronomical treasures of the world, Roquefort cheese. Bové is a leader of the local Roquefort producers association and of the second largest […]
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Do we know enough about genetically modified foods?
Genetically modified foods — you’ve heard about them, but you probably don’t know whether you’re eating them. They’re produced by splicing genes, those little segments of DNA that code for particular traits, from one plant or animal species and inserting them into another. Biotechnology companies are cooking up all sorts of techniques to engineer organisms […]
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Bean Counting
3,300 — number of cups of coffee that are consumed each second worldwide 6.3 million — metric tons of coffee produced in the world in the 1999-2000 crop year 25 million — number of farmers who grow coffee worldwide, the majority on small-scale farms 600-800 AD — the era in which an Ethiopian goat herder […]
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More Than Meats the Eye
8 pounds of grain are needed to produce one pound of beef 2,464 gallons of water are needed to produce one pound of beef 40 percent of grain is fed to livestock, poultry, or fish China’s grain consumption increased by 40 million tons between 1990 and 1995 — and 33 million of those tons were […]
