Top photo: Planting a diverse blend of crops and cover crops, and not tilling, helps promote soil health. Photo credit: Catherine Ulitsky, USDA/Flickr, CC BY Author: David R. Montgomery, University of Washington One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After […]
Top photo: Water from an irrigation system sprays flowering cotton plants on the farm of Allen Entz in Hydro, Okla, Aug. 16, 2012. AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki Author: Char Miller, W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, Pomona College Every summer the U.S. Central Plains go dry, leading farmers to tap into groundwater to […]
Top photo: Terraced rice fields in northwest Vietnam. (Shutterstock) Authors: Zia Mehrabi, University of British Columbia; Erle C. Ellis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Navin Ramankutty, University of British Columbia Every day there are roughly 386,000 new mouths to feed, and in that same 24 hours, scientists estimate between one and 100 species will […]
Microalgae (shown here, Haematococcus) convert water and carbon dioxide to oxygen and nutritious biomass in the presence of light. Algaennovation, CC BY William Moomaw, Tufts University and Asaf Tzachor, UCL Our planet faces a growing food crisis. According to the United Nations, more than 800 million people are regularly undernourished. By 2050, an additional […]
Rachael Garrett, Boston University and Joice Ferreira, Federal University of Pará Picture the Brazilian Amazon. You probably don’t see a lot of cows in that image. But, in fact, in this rainforested part of South America – home to the world’s most booming tropical agricultural region – ranching has been the most common land use […]
By Sean Mowbray This article originally appeared on Mongabay.com, 18 October 2017 (Republished under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND). Across the globe, beef consumption, is seeing rapid growth, fed by cheap imports and served by an industrialized agricultural global trade model that’s been linked to a host of environmental impacts, climate change chief among them. Beef consumption in previously meat-light […]
