Turning electricity into food
You know that when energy in agriculture is discussed, the paradigm is energy production in the form of biofuels. But the idea of biofuels manufactured from agricultural products is monumentally wrong.
agriculture
A Longtime Farmer Shares His Wisdom (part 2)
For over forty years, Nash Huber has grown healthy plants, soil, seeds — and now future farmers.
A Longtime Farmer Shares His Wisdom (part 1)
When suburban sprawl started eating up nearby farmland, Nash dedicated himself to growing a stable base of land for farming.
Unlimited competition is not sustainable
Large farms are increasingly dominating crop production in the United States. In the early 1980s, most farms produced crops on less than 600 acres, but the majority of today’s farms grow crops on at least 1,100 acres. And many farms are ten times that size.
The man who ate himself: An agricultural fable
The beetle sighed. "This is all something you once knew, I think. It is something all beings have known from the beginning of time…It is a pity, this forgetting of yours."
Harnessing the Future
Gina Wertz is a horse and ox teamster. Her animal-powered market vegetables and herbs are grown at Under the Stone Garden on the grounds of Tillers International, a Kalamazoo County working farm and learning center…
Corn, Cars and Cows
Putting gasoline blended with corn in your gas tank can increase the cost of food on your kitchen table. That’s the claim of farmers and ranchers who say federal policies mandating corn ethanol production raise the price of feed for American cattle, pork and poultry.
Gauging the urban appetite
The agendas that are set so solemnly for international (or global) food and hunger problems cannot be used at the sub-national or local administrative level, which must analyse its own problems and find practical solutions, All too often, catering sensibly to the food needs of urban populations is ignored by policy makers, while economic ‘development’ (more infrastructure, more financing, more consumption, more personal mobility at the cost of public transport) is welcomed. The provisioning of food and the planning for shortening and localising food supply chains is usually abandoned by public administrators to the ruthless methods of the market
Agriculture headlines
•China’s Bad Earth •Pesticides, fungicides harming bee colonies, UM study says •Can Agriculture Reverse Climate Change?
Climate headlines
•Reuters’ climate-change coverage ‘fell by nearly 50% with sceptic as editor’ •Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Natural Gas •Arctic methane ‘time bomb’ could have huge economic costs
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
