Climate Food and Agriculture

Understatement of the week

A federal judge tells the Bush administration that, yes, there is a difference between wild fish and farmed fish.

"A healthy hatchery population is not necessarily an indication of a healthy natural population," [Judge Coughenour] said.

Insert your insult here ...

Even USDA researchers are a bit creeped out by corporate control of food

Food production and retailing have gotten so squarely under the heel of a few corporations that even the USDA is raising an eyebrow. At the top, the agency teems with PR flacks for the agribusiness giants. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t competent researchers among the rank and file. One of them, Steven W. Martinez, […]

Food? Farms? No connection at all!

From the BBC:

The Linking Environment And Farming organisation found that 22% of 1,073 adults questioned did not know bacon and sausages originate from farms ... The survey also found four in 10 people did not know yoghurt is made using farm produce, nearly half were unaware the raw ingredients for beer start off in farmers' fields and 23% did not know bread's main ingredients came from the farm.

(I'm not pinging on the Brits; I'm sure the U.S. is even worse.)

Dairy farmers’ organic practices called into question

Regulation might not be the best way to create greener markets, but the right sort of regulations enforced the right way can work.

That's a lesson in the organic market, which witnessed a first this week: a mega-organic dairy with 10,000 cows (3,500 "organic"), which was clearly skirting regulations, was suspended by a certifier and no longer allowed to sell "organic" milk.

Global warming, agriculture, and fossil fuels

In the article "A Perennial Search for Perfect Wheat" in yesterday's New York Times science section, writer Jim Robbins highlights one of the slow-moving global disasters of our age: the destruction of the world's soils. This in turn is part of a wider problem: global ecosystem destruction, including depleted oceans, cleared forests, and overgrazed grasslands.

As for erosion, Robbins writes:

Umbra on seltzer bottles

Dear Umbra, I love drinking fizzy water, especially in the summer, but I am appalled to learn that the plastic bottles use petroleum in their production. Plus, hauling them home from the supermarket burns gas. I’ve been looking at seltzer bottles, also known as soda siphons, the original source of carbonated water, and also much […]

Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Pesticide-Free Garden

Pesticide exposure increases risk of Parkinson’s disease, study says A new study from researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland concludes that pesticide exposure increases the risk of getting Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative condition affecting the nervous system. Patients from five European countries participated in the study, published in the Journal of Occupational and […]

Pesticide efficacy is decreasing

If you've ever colored Easter eggs -- I mean the old-fashioned way, with food-coloring, not with those plastic wraparounds -- then you know that when you mess up, you have two options: rinse them off with some white vinegar and start over, or forge ahead, layer even more color on top, and hope that something presentable emerges.

Okay, so that metaphor's a bit of a stretch, but that's what came to mind when I read, earlier this week, that scientists at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, have engineered a new category of transgenic crops. The new plants -- which include broad-leafed greens such as soybeans, tomatoes, and tobacco -- harbor a bacterial gene that makes them resistant to an herbicide called dicamba.

"But we have Roundup!" you cry. "Why do we need anything else?" Well, because Roundup (active ingredient: a chemical called glyphosate) isn't working as flawlessly as it used to. According to the story in Science (sorry, subscription only), 24 percent of farmers in the northern Midwest and 29 percent in the South say they have glycophate-resistant (GR) weeds. Crop scientists in Argentina, Brazil, and Australia report GR grasses popping up too.

On summer memories and politically correct peanut butter

The cool, sunny mornings this time of year always remind me of setting off to work each day during the first few months that I spent living in Boston. It was the summer between my junior and senior year of college, and I was working for a feminist newspaper located in an old factory near […]

World grain supplies tanking

Once again, a prediction is panning out(PDF):

The world is consistently failing to produce as much grain as it uses.

Every six years, we're adding to the world the equivalent of a North American population. We're trying to feed those extra people, feed a growing livestock herd, and now, feed our cars, all from a static farmland base. No one should be surprised that food production can't keep up.

The USDA projects global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record. Further, it is likely that, outside of wartime, global grain supplies have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer ...

(Another hat tip to KO.)