agriculture
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Congress about to let agribiz get liberal — with pesticides
There's a quiet but vicious fight going on in Congress to restrict the EPA's ability to regulate pesticides, and industry is poised to win.
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SciAm op-ed: Kill biofuels to solve the food crisis
With the Senate successfully passing an amendment to end the 45-cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy for American refiners and the 54-cent tariff on imported ethanol, I thought I'd point to this terrific op-ed in Scientific American on how to solve the food crisis. According to author Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University, it's the biofuels, stupid.
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Farm pork not going anywhere
To read The Washington Post is to believe farm subsidies are headed for the chopping block. Not so fast. The subsidies aren't going anywhere after all
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A fight over the future of farming: U.N. ag group vs. Big Ag
Small-ag mindset vs. Big Ag muscle.“The present paradigm of intensive crop production cannot meet the challenges of the new millennium,” says a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In other words: Big Ag, step aside. It’s not as if the world is being fed particularly well at the moment — […]
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Which crop is the biggest water hog? (Warning: You’re not gonna like the answer.)
Agriculture is thirsty work. Growing and processing food takes a ton of water, and it's only going to get worse as the world warms. So which crop has the biggest water footprint? (That's defined, by the way, as the volume of fresh water used to make the product, across all steps of production.) You're not […]
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FDA admits supermarket chickens test positive for arsenic
Why is Big Ag playing chicken with our health?Back in March, Tom Philpott wrote about the “insane” practice of feeding factory-farmed chickens arsenic: The idea is that it makes them grow faster — fast growth being the supreme goal of factory animal farming — and helps control a common intestinal disease called coccidiosis. The industry […]
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Contaminated compost? Toxins might be lurking in that bag you’re about to buy
Do you know what’s in your compost?The growing number of municipal and commercial composting operations has been one of the few bright spots in the environmental landscape, from San Francisco’s curbside composting service to this industrial-scale composting facility in Delaware. But Josh Harkinson in Mother Jones has harshed our green-tinged buzz. Thanks to fractured or […]
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Think the German E. coli outbreak couldn’t happen here? Think again
An outbreak of a toxic, possibly novel, strain of E. coli known as O104:H4 continues to rage in Germany. At last count, more than 1,800 people have been infected and 19 have died — and unusually, young women rather than children or the elderly have been hit the hardest. So far, the outbreak seems confined […]
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E-I-E-I-Oh no: Decades of antibiotics in farm animals lead to deadly superbugs
When cows kill. This article was syndicated with permission from OnEarth. Stuart Levy once kept a flock of chickens on a farm in the rolling countryside west of Boston. No ordinary farmer, Levy is a professor of molecular biology and microbiology and of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. This was decades ago, and his chickens were […]
