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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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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Stacking the Biotech Deck
Back in the 1970s the awesome news that scientists had learned how to redesign genes started a regulatory flurry. Distinguished panels met to ask imponderable questions. Could some human-created form of life carry self-multiplying havoc into the world? How can we prevent such a disaster? Image: Courtesy DOE Human Genome Project. Back then genetic escapes […]
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Take the World Food Quiz
Gathering grain in Sudan. In some ways the world food situation hasn’t changed for decades. There are still millions of starving people. There are still places where so much food is grown that it has to be thrown away. Fertilizers and pesticides pollute the countryside; soil erodes; groundwater tables drop. Every year when the new […]
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He's all abuzz about socially responsible coffee
I am in the local coffee shop in Paonia, Colo., drinking a cup of joe and pleasantly anticipating its effects on my brain. My companion, Eli Wolcott, isn’t drinking a drop. He doesn’t ask what coffee can do for him; he asks what he can do for coffee. Eli Wolcott (the mug’s just a prop). […]
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It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (known familiarly as CJD) is something you do not want to get. Your brain degenerates, piece by piece. First you feel depressed, then you have trouble coordinating. You lose sight, speech, motor control, as the disease travels through the brain. When it reaches the control centers for breathing or heartbeat, you die. Medical […]
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It's Report-Card Time
The timing is unbearable. Here on my desk in the middle of the blooming, buzzing month of May is the best report yet on the state of the world’s ecosystems. Best not because it contains good news — it doesn’t — but because it’s short and clear and blunt. The report evaluates the health of […]
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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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Let's Look Before We Leap into Biotech
Biotech stocks plummeted last week as President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair requested that companies make their data on the human genome public. Private firms are racing madly to read and patent the genetic code that makes you you and me me. They are trying to beat publicly funded labs, which are required […]
