Climate Food and Agriculture
Climate + Food and Agriculture
EDITOR’S NOTE
Grist has acquired the archive and brand assets of The Counter, a decorated nonprofit food and agriculture publication that we long admired, but that sadly ceased publishing in May of 2022.
The Counter had hit on a rich vein to report on, and we’re excited to not only ensure the work of the staffers and contractors of that publication is available for posterity, but to build on it. So we’re relaunching The Counter as a food and agriculture vertical within Grist, continuing their smart and provocative reporting on food systems, specifically where it intersects with climate and environmental issues. We’ve also hired two amazing new reporters to make our plan a reality.
Being back on the food and agriculture beat in a big way is critical to Grist’s mission to lead the conversation, highlight climate solutions, and uncover environmental injustices. What we eat and how it’s produced is one of the easiest entry points into the wider climate conversation. And from this point of view, climate change literally transforms into a kitchen table issue.
Featured
The people who feed America are going hungry
Climate change is escalating a national crisis, leaving farmworkers with empty plates and mounting costs.
Latest Articles
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Food for Thought: Britain’s food system
The fixings for a traditional British turkey dinner could travel more than 24,000 miles before they reach the table, according to a report released yesterday by the U.K. lobby group Sustain. On average, food consumed in Britain travels 50 percent more than it did a decade ago, at the expense of human and environmental health. […]
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Speedy Gone-zales
Mexico is losing forests at almost twice the rate previously thought, the country’s Environment Ministry announced yesterday. A new multi-agency study of satellite images taken from 1993 and 2000 found that average forest loss in that time was about 2.78 million acres a year, the world’s second-highest deforestation rate. Over the eight years, the amount […]
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I Wanna Be Like Myco
They’re good in salads, lovely with pasta … and great for the earth? The humble mushroom could help clean up everything from oil spills to pesticides, thanks to a new technology called mycoremediation. Mushroom expert Paul Stamets pioneered the technology against the bacteria E. coli and then partnered with scientists at the Pacific Northwest National […]
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Grain and Bear It
New policies emerging in China could bode well for that poster child of protection efforts, the panda. In an article published last week in the journal Science, scientists from the World Wildlife Fund and Beijing University praised China’s National Forest Conservation Program and its “Grain-to-Green” policy as likely to preserve habitat crucial to panda survival. […]
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China's water table levels are dropping fast
If you aren’t normally fascinated by China’s agricultural problems, then an obscure report issued this summer on the state of the nation’s water supply might have struck you as rather dry. But in this case, dry is precisely the problem: The water table under the North China Plain, which produces over half of China’s wheat […]
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Momentum grows for greener ways of farming
Rice as rice can be. In the humid hills of China’s Yunnan province, rice farmers make their living from plots of land smaller than many American yards. High, cool, and wet, the country here is rich, yielding almost a thousand pounds of rice per acre. But farmers face a perennial scourge: rice blast. Rice blast […]
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How Now, Brown Cow?
The 450,000 dairy cows in Southern California are contributing to some of the dirtiest air in the country — and regulators want to clamp down. The cows kick up tons of dust and their manure emits ammonia that joins with nitrogen oxide from vehicle tailpipes to create particulate pollution. Dairies in the area account for […]
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Pampas and Circumstances
More than 1,500 farmers now plant 7 million acres of organic crops a year in Argentina, up from 220 farmers and 13,000 acres in 1995. For the most part, people in Argentina haven’t developed a taste for the stuff — 90 percent of the country’s organic crops are exported, mostly to the U.S. and Europe. […]
