Agriculture

Looking to the states on climate adaptation

The National Climate Assessment released yesterday states what most of us already know: Climate change is occurring and having real and costly impacts, but we aren’t ready.

The bogeyman of fungicidal resistance

When my kids were young, one of our favorite nighttime books was Fungus the Bogeyman, a story about a subterranean bogeyman who spends his waking hours scaring humans. The kids and I loved all the disgusting bogeyman slang like pus and muck.

Obama’s GMO problem

The Obama Administration’s feverish cheerleading for genetically modified crops is being put to the test with growing evidence that the technology is unpopular with consumers, causing problems in the field and facing increasing rejection in the marketplace.

Why should a bank be allowed to own and trade oil, metals or land?

The Board of the Federal Reserve asked this question, in essence, and 25 questions related to it in an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

Climate change in the 2015 federal budget and Farm Bill

This blog was originally published on RuralClimateNetwork.org.

Minnesota's continuous living groundcover

Of Minnesota’s 55.6 million acres, 27 million acres are taken up by farmland. Currently, crop production is dominated by summer annuals like corn and soybeans, which need to be replanted each year and grow only in the summer. The consequence of this type of cropping is that for most of the year, no active roots exist in the soil to filter water, reduce runoff, or prevent erosion.

A path toward better agricultural investment

The food crisis of 2008 led to a broad agreement in the agricultural development community that the lack of appropriate investment in agriculture had been a key contributing factor to unstable prices and food insecurity. The crisis coincided with an increase in land grabbing in many parts of the world, but especially in Africa.

WEBINAR: Can Food Safety Become a Game Changer Against Industrializing Meat Production in China?

China's meat revolution has entailed a massive increase in the concentrations of pigs, cows, poultry on "specialized" farms with intense price competition amongst retailers and processors that provide "cheap" and abundant meat to an urban population. Subsequent food safety problems are resulting in further government incentives for industrialization of the supply chain, with the U.S.

WEBINAR: China's Meat Revolution: Agribusiness, Growth and Its Limits

China is the world's largest producer and consumer of pork, the second largest producer of poultry and the fourth largest dairy producer. How and why has China achieved this "meat miracle"? What are the politics of this growth and the role of Chinese and foreign transnationals? Can China continue producing and consuming more or are there social and ecological limits that create "peak meat"?