Search results for “sustainable agriculture”:
A thoughtful new piece published online by Aeon calls for a reboot of how the nation’s livestock farmers do business. Grassland 2.0 calls for our livestock farmers to also become grass farmers. It is a re-invention of a very old wheel: the idea that animals and pasture can work together as a kind of ecosystem. […]
Read More, References, Comment »
Last week the USDA unveiled it’s new Agriculture Innovation Agenda, a “sustainability” plan with the goal of achieving a 50% reduction in the environmental footprint of US agriculture by 2050, as Politico reports. Sonny Perdue announced the new policy at an annual agency gathering in Virginia on February 20, 2020, or 02/20/2020 – an appropriate […]
Read More, References, Comment »
Liebman and Gallandt, 1997 Matt Liebman and Eric Gallandt, “Many Little Hammers: Ecological Management of Crop-Weed Interactions,” In Ecology and Agriculture,” Ed: L.E. Jackson, 1997, Academic Press. SUMMARY: This is the first introduction of the phrase “many little hammers” to describe what is now known as integrated weed management, or IWM. IWM relies on using a […]
We have posted a summary of an important report from a European think tank — “An agroecological Europe in 2050: multifunctional agriculture for healthy eating. Findings from the Ten Years For Agroecology (TYFA) “. This report that lays out a concrete plan — and path — toward a safer, sustainable agricultural system that promotes human […]
Read More, References, Comment »
Two new publications were released in the last week that contribute much new food for thought in the global discussion around the sustainability of the Earth’s food systems. First off, on January 16th the Lancet published a special feature called “Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems.” As Reuters reports, […]
Read More, References, Comment »
It’s not just leaves that have been falling this season, the past months have seen several intense climate change reports drop on us too. First up was the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an exhaustive report on what it will take to keep warming under a critical limit, “Global Warming of 1.5° C.” […]
Read More, References, Comment »
While the Farm Bill update hasn’t made it through Congress yet, it’s passage is an eventual certainty, if perhaps broken up into pieces. In an opinion piece in The Hill, economic policy Research Fellow Michael Farren with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University proposes a different and radical option – a full repeal of […]
Read More, References, Comment »
First, the back story. Over the years, the USDA has almost always sided with pesticide manufacturers and farmers, in opposition to EPA efforts to curtail or end the use of high-risk pesticides. The arguments advanced by the USDA are always basically the same: There are no viable alternatives to this pesticide. Consumers will face food […]
Read More, References, Comment »
The following “Open Letter” has been sent to the CEO of Cibus, a company doing cutting-edge R+D using CRISPR and other gene-editing and gene-silencing technologies (referred to as CRISPR et al. in the letter below). The letter responds to a recent Scientific American Network blog by the CEO of Cibus, Dr. Peter Beetham. His hope, and Cibus’s mission, […]
Read More, References, Comment »
Yes, you heard us right. Robotics is coming to agriculture. Companies around the world are racing to develop new tools in this rapidly growing field. China just launched a seven-year program to develop “autonomous agriculture” (Minter, 2018), and organic farmers in Australia are getting a $250,000 government grant to use robotic weeders on their organic […]
Read More, References, Comment »
