The Next Green Revolution (This Time Without Fossil Fuels)
A method of growing crops called the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) produces yields that can be four or five times higher than other methods.
Food & Water
21 Inspiring Initiatives Working to Reduce Food Waste Around the World
This week we’re celebrating World Environment Day (June 5th) by highlighting innovations working to reduce the tremendous food waste and loss that occurs throughout the world.
Food & agriculture – June 4
•Breaking the grass ceiling: On U.S. farms, women are taking the reins •The USDA’s Latest Report on Energy Use in Agriculture •More Than Honey •Is the US About to Become One Big Factory Farm for China? •Peak Water, Peak Oil …Now, Peak Soil?
Water – June 3
•Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust •How to Save Water-Starved Cities •Water may reshape energy industry •Analysis: China: High and dry •Stressed Ecosystems Leaving Humanity High and Dry
Greener Pastures: A Tour of Marin Sun Farms
In a food system where meat production is typically hidden from the public’s view, Marin Sun aims to shed light on all the steps from pasture to plate. “Transparency is an incredibly important part of this process,” said Danny Kramer, one of our tour guides and Marin Sun’s Chief Operations Officer.
How to run a farm on sheer, total, utter neglect by Mark Shepard
Shepard’s latest book, Restoration Agriculture has a trade mark management technique, STUN, Sheer, Total, Utter, Neglect.
March Against Monsanto Unites Global Food Activists
Just 48 hours after the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly rejected an amendment that would allow states to require labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods, more than 1,000 people filed into the Federal Plaza in Chicago, IL, on May 25 to march against Monsanto, the company whose policies have brought the problem of genetically modified food to the forefront.
Michael Pollan on the Links Between Biodiversity and Health
It was an odd paradox that led author Michael Pollan to write a book about cooking: How was it, he wondered, that in an era when Americans were buying more and more pre-packaged, ready-to-eat food, they were spending more time watching programs about cooking on television?
Much ado about phosphorus
The problem here is, that we’ve switched from a closed loop system where the waste from the farm house goes into the farm yard and all the phosphorus can recycle, to a linear system where the phosphorus gets mined…
Science as Dialogue: What My Garden and I Are Discussing in 2013
How I’m using the scientific method to learn how to grow the most food possible in my backyard, and how other people can do so as well.
Scraps and the City
Food and other organic material (by which I mean yard waste and prunings) make up a whopping 25 percent of New York’s residential waste stream: that’s a huge amount to potentially divert from landfills and incinerators. Compost it instead and we’d be saving the city money (New York spends more than $330 million a year hauling waste to landfills) and avoiding the generation of the greenhouse gas methane, which is produced when organic material rots in the airless confines of a dump.
Urbanites help sustain Japan’s historic rice paddy terraces
If flocks of city-dwellers will trek to steep hillside paddies to work in the damp spring weather, then nothing seems impossible.
