Shared from the 5/9/2019 The Denver Post eEdition
By Brian Melley The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES» The nation’s most productive agricultural state moved Wednesday to ban a controversial pesticide widely used to control a range of insects but blamed for harming brain development in ba...
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...
BRUSSELS » The European Union made a key breakthrough Friday to ban pesticides that harm bees and their crop pollination.
The 28 member states got a large majority, representing some three-quarters of its population, backing the ban on the three prevalent neonicotinoid pesticides, which will t...
HOLYOKE FARMLAND
Solar-powered pivot a success By Jeff Rice Sterling Journal-Advocate
Randy Weis and his mother, Darlene, stand in front of the solar array on their farm southeast of Holyoke. Jeff Rice, Sterling Journal-Advocate
Randy Weis’ potatoes weren’t just nourished by sunshine this p...
While India reaped the benefits of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, her neighbour China is now taking the lead in another area of sustainable agriculture -- developing crops that meet the challenges posed by global warming.
Chinese agricultural scientists are wo...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced the availability of $3.8 million to support research, education, and extension projects that will assist current organic producers and those transitioning into organic farming. The funding is available through the Organic Transitions Program,...
As the world enters into a sixth great extinction, scientists are racing against the clock to save genetic evidence from plants around the world.
An ambitious project launched Wednesday to collect the genomes of the planet's major plant groups within the next two years and put them into deep freeze...
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...
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- ...
Pollution in urban and farm runoff in Hawaii is causing tumors in endangered sea turtles, a new study finds.
The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed open-access journal PeerJ, shows that nitrogen in the runoff ends up in algae that the turtles eat, promoting the formation of tumors on the...
Changes spare top birds of Britain and allows trapping and releasing protected species found on farmland
Landowners wanting to be allowed to shoot robins, pied wagtails, starlings and other favourite birds seen eating their crops have been rebuffed by the government. But shooters will be able to le...
About 60 percent of California is experiencing "exceptional drought," the U.S. Drought Monitor's most dire classification. The agency issued the same warning to Texas and the southeastern United States in 2012. California's last two winters have been among the driest since records began in 1879. Wit...
The world's grasslands are being destabilized by fertilization, according to a paper recently published in the journal Nature. In a study of 41 grassland communities on five continents, researchers found that the presence of fertilizer weakened grassland species diversity. The researchers surveyed g...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is helping farmers and ranchers protect farmlands and wetlands through a new conservation program.
Farmers and ranchers are keeping land in agriculture and in some cases creating new wetlands through the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program.
Landowners agre...
Honey Bees are dying and now a team of environmental regulators has been tasked with determining why.
On Friday, President Barack Obama announced plans for a task force to help save the bees. The team, which will be co-chaired by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Environmental Protectio...
Ambitious mitigation efforts, however, could decrease the pollution by 50 percent. The analysis is the very first to quantify this.
"Nitrogen is an irreplaceable nutrient and a true life-saver as it helps agriculture to feed a growing world population – but it is unfortunately also a dangerous poll...
Article by: Helena Paul
The US looks set to approve GM crops that resist the ‘Agent Orange’ pesticide 2,4-D as well as glyphosate, writes Helena Paul. If it does, the toxic chemical – created in WW2 to destroy enemy food supplies – will soon end up in animal feeds, and the food we eat.
W...
Unbridled industrialization with almost no environmental regulation has resulted in the toxic contamination of one-fifth of China's farmland, the Communist Party has acknowledged for the first time.
The report, issued by the ministries of Environmental Protection and Land and Resources, says 16.1 p...
