nitrogen
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No, that’s not snow: Pesticides coat California’s Central Valley
Take a photo journey through America's fruit basket, where excess nitrates and pesticides contaminate drinking water and showering with tap water can lead to rashes.
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New tool calculates your nitrogen footprint and explains why you should be ashamed of it
Are you looking for something to flagellate yourself over? Carbon footprints are last week’s news: The new hot subject for self-recrimination is your nitrogen footprint. According to the International Nitrogen Initiative, your nitrogen consumption is contributing to a host of environmental ills: Today, reactive nitrogen has dramatically increased in our air and water. It comes […]
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Fish kill whodunnit in Gulf: Is Big Ag or Big Oil the perp?
A sickening massacre of fish has nearly paved a Louisiana waterway with dead bodies. There are two likely suspects, and probably neither will be brought to justice.
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Ask Umbra on healthy soil for urban and suburban farmers and gardeners
A reader wants to know if urban dirt is safe for growing food. Is there lead in that urban farm salad? Umbra investigates and gives some savvy tips.
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New podcast: interview with Nancy Rabalais, expert on the Gulf dead zone
In the latest edition of Victual Reality, the podcast about food politics, I talk to Nancy Rabalais, the scientist who leads an annual voyage into the Gulf dead zone to measure the extent of its destruction.
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More corn for meat and ethanol, less habitat for Gulf fish
As if the Deepwater Horizon disaster weren’t enough, this year’s dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest ever.
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Acid rain is back, and thanks to farming, worse than ever
When you gargoyle with acid rain, you’ll get that grin wiped right off your face.(Nino Barbieri via Wikimedia)Policy makers, environmentalists — even Republicans — like to congratulate themselves on the “victory” over acid rain. As this American success story is usually told, acid rain’s effects were addressed by a 1990 update to the Clean Air […]
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Corn industry brazenly turns Gulf disaster into marketing opportunity
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (the dull gray color southeast of the Mississippi Delta) seen by satellite on May 1 Photo: NASAAs if being bombarded with oil from below and chemical dispersants from above weren’t enough, the Gulf of Mexico also has to endure marketing rhetoric from a long-time tormentor: the corn industry. Industrial corn […]
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Foreign Policy mag spotlights ‘peak phosphorous’
Where your food comes from: a phosphate mine in Florida run by the fertilizer giant Mosaic. Mosaic is two-thirds owned by Cargill, the globe’s largest agribusiness company, with interests in meat, feed, biofuels, and more. Photo: Susan Dracket, via FlickrAs Grist’s recent special series showed, our reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has serious ecological, geopolitical, […]