By Virginia Ruiz, Eugenia Economos, Food Tank
Right now, farming with toxic pesticides is the norm. But, for the health of all people from farm to table, we need to create a food system where organic is for all. The solution is here—we just have to grow it.
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
An important new paper, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science (RSOS), makes a convincing case that modern broiler chickens are a “distinct and characteristic new morphospecies ….[that] symbolizes the unprecedented human reconfiguration of the Earth’s biosphere.”
By FCRN Staff, Food Climate Research Network
Over 40% of insect species are at risk of extinction over the next few decades and 75% to 98% of insect biomass has already been lost, according to this review of the current state of knowledge about insect declines, with habitat loss through conversion to intensive agriculture being the main driver. Agro-chemical pollutants, invasive species and climate change are also driving insect declines.
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
Continued intensification of the food system will lead to increased pressure on nature as well as the continued erosion of food culture.
By Wyatt Massey, YES! magazine
So Sue George organized her neighbors and created a legal document to protect her farm, and town, from the large-scale hog operations she said are destroying a way of life and polluting the environment.
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
Industrialized agriculture prioritizes efficiency and quantity over human and ecological flourishing: it pushes farmers to plant more commodities over greater swaths of land,
By Paul Alward, Resilience.org
In the recent debate about beef and it’s impact on the environment there are two views. There are those who view cattle as greenhouse-gas belching planet destroyers, while others depict them as benevolent carbon sequestration machines.
By Russell Arben Fox, In media res
Charles C. Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet, published earlier this year, is a fabulous book. Not a perfect book; sometimes, in order to bulk up this two-pronged thesis, he will throw in supplementary material that threatens to bog down his central investigation. But that investigation comes through loud and clear all the same, and it is one worth looking at closely.
By Gracy Olmstead, American Conservative
The ethos we’ve built around farming in the United States is broken. Rather than encouraging farmers to eliminate risk by diversifying their crops, pursuing sustainability, and embracing a proper scale, we’ve propped up a truly unsustainable style of production with subsidies and insurance programs.
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
New research demonstrates – again – how deceptive the concepts of productivity and efficiency are in agriculture. Huge increases in labor productivity and modest increases in land productivity are gained by a massive increase of use of external resources, while natural capital is depleted. Is that efficient?