U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
By Remy Tumin
The New York Times
A biotech company in Georgia has received conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the first vaccine for honeybees, a move scientists say could help pave the way for controlling a range of viruses and pests th...
By Julie Creswell
© The New York Times Co.
Driving rain pelted the windows of “the Tower,” a second-story glass enclosure in Ray Gaesser’s home that provides a view for miles of the gentle, rolling fields around Corning, Iowa. Inside, away from the elements, Gaesser pondered what the coming year m...
By Michael Phillis
The Associated Press
ST. LOUIS » The climate deal reached last week by Senate Democrats could reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that American farmers produce by expanding programs that help accumulate carbon in soil, fund climate-focused research and lower the abundant metha...
Dwindling profits, high taxes spell end for small farms across Midwest
By Alyssa Schukar
© The New York Times Co.
In his earliest memories of his family’s farm, Ethan Uhlir rides in an old truck with his grandfather Arden, feeding cattle and mending fences.
Before Arden Uhlir’s death fiv...
By Laura van der Pol, Dale Manning, Francesca Cotrufo and Megan Machmuller The Conversation
As the effects of climate change intensify and paths for limiting global warming narrow, politicians, media and environmental advocates have rallied behind “carbon farming” as a mutually bene...
By John Flesher The Associated Press
MECOSTA, MICH. » For generations, Brian Sackett’s family has farmed potatoes that are made into chips found on grocery shelves in much of the eastern U.S.
About 25% of the nation’s potato chips get their start in Michigan, where reliably cool air during Se...
By Emily Schmall and Karan Deep Singh © The New York Times Co.
BHAGWANPURA, INDIA » The farmer sat in the house his grandfather built, contemplating economic ruin. Jaswinder Singh Gill had plowed 20 years of savings from an earlier career as a mechanical engineer into his family’s nearly 40-acre pl...
Shared from the 3/11/2020 The Denver Post eEdition By Mark Buchanan Bloomberg Opinion
The biggest cause of global warming is all the carbon dioxide we have expelled into the atmosphere since the beginning of industrial times.
The greenhouse gas traps heat in the atmosphere, raising temperatur...
One of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, especially bees, for a successful harvest. And in the past several months, a scramble in California’s almond groves has given the world a taste of what may lie in store for food production if the widespread — and still puzzling...
By Joby Warrick August 17, 2014
WILLOWS, Calif. — When the winter rains failed to arrive in this Sacramento Valley town for the third straight year, farmers tightened their belts and looked to the reservoirs in the nearby hills to keep them in water through the growing season.
When those faltered,...
By Dennis Dimick, National Geographic
PUBLISHED AUGUST 21, 2014
Aquifers provide us freshwater that makes up for surface water lost from drought-depleted lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. We are drawing down these hidden, mostly nonrenewable groundwater supplies at unsustainable rates in the western ...
As water shortages grip California and the seven state Colorado River basin, many users feel no pain, while some face a complete curtailment. That’s because the water management system is not designed to be either efficient or equitable but consistent and predictable. And it is.
As is typ...
If you ask most experts why we should worry about all those honeybees and wild bees that are famously dying off, they'll often give a simple answer: because bees pollinate so many of our crops.
Without bees flitting from flower to flower, spreading pollen as they go, we wouldn’t have bountiful harv...
They're big eyed, small bodies, hard boned, and busy. Busy bees are where your honey comes from, duh, but have you ever marveled at how intricate and thought out the whole honey making operation is for these nano sized critters? It all begins with the pollen. Bees have a miraculous ability to pollin...
Maria Venegas, 61, holds 20-month-old grandson Julian after giving him a bath outside. They live in Seville, California, a community in the San Joaquin Valley whose water system failed this summer but will soon be fixed. Maria rarely has running water in the house.
Farmers are guzzling ground...
The bee: a small insect with a flair for architecture, a sweet harvest and a colossal influence on our lives. It turns out we’ve been taking them a bit for granted. Up until recently, few of us understood the role they play in the running of our planet’s biosphere. That is about to change, if it has...
As California endures its fourth year of drought, water restrictions are taking effect across the state. On April 1, Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order implementing a mandatory 25 percent water cutback in cities and towns across the state from 2013 usage levels. It took effect June 1.
B...
Sea-level rise may not be eating away at Colorado’s borders, but climate change exposes other critical vulnerabilities in the state, according to a new report. Rising temperatures likely will take a toll on cattle and crops, for example, and could more often leave junior water rights holde...
Colorado is looking for 163 billion gallons of water, and a long-awaited state plan for finding it calls for increased conservation, reusing treated wastewater and diverting more water from the Western Slope.
The plan, ordered by Gov. John Hickenlooper to deal with a massive projected water shortfa...
The so-called "Green Revolution" that William Gaud, Former Director of the US Agency for International Development, was so strongly advocating, includes the extensive use of insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, large-scale irrigation, increased used of fossil-fuels and mono- ...
