Test Drive: The Beyond Burger
Taking the Beyond Burger out for a test drive. While a bit spendy, this Plant Meat 2.0 burger is meal both carnivores and vegetarians can love.
Environment
What Farmers Can Do About Climate Change: Pest Management
With climate change contributing to increasing pest pressures, integrated pest management provides farmers with sustainable options.
Conservation Cooking: 13 Bean Soup
For chefs and cooks wanting to support sustainable agriculture, no better place to start than this 13 Bean Soup recipe hearty, refined, and restaurant ready.
Who Pays to Steward the Commons?
Environmentalists want fisherman to pay for fishery management. Fisherman say the fees are onerous. Who should pay to steward the commons?
Plant Scientists Must Play a Role in Climate Smart Agriculture
Kevin Folta of the University of Florida explains why molecular biologists and plant breeders must play a role in Climate Smart Agriculture.
Nitrogen Efficient Crops: Can We Grow More and Cut Emissions?
Breeding nitrogen-efficient plants could boost crop productivity and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions while reducing fertilizer use.
New Study Finds Neonicotinoids May Have Harmful, Beneficial, or No Effects on Bee Health
Reporting on two new papers on neocotinoids and bee health single out the pesticides, but a closer look at the data doesn’t support that angle.
Merging Agromodernism with Skepticism: A Manure Detection Kit
What happens when you combine the principles of ecomodernism with the tools of scientific skepticism? Agromodernism: A pragmatic path to sustainable food production.
WAPO Reporting on Organic Dairy Underscores a Core Problem with Organic
Recent reporting on organic dairy production in the Washington Post underscores a preoccupation with the aesthetic appeal of organics and little interest in the environmental impacts.
Trump’s Rash Departure From Paris Agreement Leaves Farmers Worse Off
National Farmer’s Union president Roger Johnson on why Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement will be bad for farmers.
The Resistance of Peruvian Coffee
In Peru, as yellow rust disease has devastated top quality coffee harvests, coca for cocaine is filling for farmers who need to bolster sagging incomes.
We Need Your Data on Conservation Ag Practices
The Environmental Defense Funds genuinely believes that conservation practices are good for farmers and landowners’ bottom lines. But faith isn’t a strong selling point. They need help putting together the data and the evidence. This is a call to farmers to share their data on conservation practices and how they affect the bottom line.
The Soil Health Revolution
The possibility of a win-win for farmers and the environment is a driving force for the soil health movement. It is a management philosophy centered around four simple principles: reduce or eliminate tillage, keep plant residues on the soil surface, keep living roots in the ground, and maximize diversity of plants and animals.
Can We Save the Algae Biofuel Industry?
In the last decade or so, vast amounts of money have been invested in the development of algae for biofuel production. This made sense because, ten years ago, there was a need to find alternatives to fossil fuels due to the high oil price and the increasing recognition that carbon emissions were causing climate change. Algal biofuels were touted as the answer to these twin problems, and huge investment followed.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite to plan.
Have We Lost 75% of Crop Diversity? It’s Not That Simple
Colin K. Khoury of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture looks at claims that 75% of crop diversity has been lost in the modern era. Instead, he finds that though there have been winners and losers among crops as agriculture has intensified, over the past 50 years, almost all countries’ diets actually became more diverse, not less, for the crops that FAO statistics do report.
Palm Oil Production Frozen Over Company Abuses
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil has frozen Goodhope Asia Holdings palm oil operations on seven concessions in Indonesia. The company had been linked to various cases of environmental and human rights abuses in the archipelago country, including allegations of grabbing land from an indigenous community in Papua province, on the heavily forested island of New Guinea, where the industry is quickly expanding.
A New Framework to Halt Palm Oil Deforestation?
Companies have said they need more support from governments of tropical forest nations to make their Zero Deforestation Commitments a reality, citing a maze of administrative and regulatory frameworks across palm oil producing countries as hampering their efforts.
The new HCS Approach Toolkit might help address this very issue, however, as it is intended to standardize the methodology for protecting tropical forests and identifying suitable landscapes for the sustainable production of palm oil.
Crop Probiotics: How More Science and Less Hype Can Help Farmers
While crop probiotics offer an ecologically friendly option for farmers looking to improve and protect their harvests, the Australian market is far from reliable.
Our research group was asked to evaluate commercial crop probiotics. Over a year of experimentation on a sugarcane farm, we tracked the supposedly beneficial bacteria and fungi of two Australian probiotics products from soil to crop.
DNA analysis didn’t detect changes in root-associated bacteria, but the composition of root-associated fungi changed.
Facing up to Phosphorus
Farmers around the world have come to depend on manufactured inorganic fertilizers containing key plant nutrients phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium to enhance soil fertility, especially in the otherwise poor soils of most tropical settings. But while all three are relatively abundant in nature, commercially viable sources of phosphorus to make these fertilizers could be exhausted just a few decades from now. That prospect, which remains a source of heated debate, has spurred a drive to recover the significant quantities of this element that disappear in the waste streams of cities and farms.
The Cult of Perma
Graham Strouts deconstructs the meaning and definition of permaculture and exposes the lack of data, rigor, and evidence to support any claims for superior productivity or environmental impact to the modes of production it is meant to serve as an alternative to.
When all is said and done, any contribution permaculture has to make will be practices that work will work independent of the whole edifice. Just as “alternative medicine” that works is just called “medicine” so anything that could be shown to work in what is called “permaculture” is simply “good farming”, “good design” or “good engineering”.