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Across Farm Country, Fertilizer Pollution Impacts Not Just Health, but Water Costs, Too

Civil Eats

When Jeff Broberg and his wife, Erica, moved to their 170-acre bean and grain farm in Winona, Minnesota in 1986, their well water measured at 8.6 These nitrogen-based compounds, common in agricultural runoff, are linked to multiple cancers and health issues for those exposed. Fertilizer as Poison The U.S. ppm for nitrates.

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The Sustainable Soil-ution Beneath Your Feet

Sustainable Harvest International

.” ” — Rattan Lal, professor of soil science + 2020 World Food Prize Laureate Conventional, or industrial, agriculture uses chemicals to defend crops from weeds, certain insect species, and diseases. Harsh chemical fertilizers disrupt natural soil networks made up of plants and fungi.

Compost 59
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Opinion: To Find the Future of Food, We Need to Look to the Past

Modern Farmer

Catastrophe loomed everywhere I looked: in the dust bowls on the once-fertile plains of central Turkey, in the vanishing lakes of Mexico City, in the fetid cesspools outside the factory farms of North Carolina, in the disease-ravaged olive trees of Puglia, in the rapid wiping away of diverse food webs in every biome.

Food 139
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The Kelp Business is Booming. How Big is Too Big?

Modern Farmer

A quick taste test proves it true: Their crop is ready to harvest. But just like industrial agriculture on land, such operations can harm the environment – and given the role kelp forests play in sequestering carbon, the climate. It’s also relatively cheap. The two states account for more than 85 percent of the U.S.

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Summer reading 2024: Our recommended food and farming reads

Sustainable Food Trust

Across seven chapters, each uncovering a different element of the Welsh landscape, Graves celebrates the diverse ecosystems of his homeland, revealing how the land has been transformed by humans ever since they first began harvesting wood and herding animals.

Food 98
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The U.S.-Mexico tortilla war

Food Environment and Reporting Network

Heavy lobbying, campaign contributions, and revolving doors have cemented institutional cultures where US-made agricultural biotechnologies are understood as benevolent extensions of US foreign aid and trade policy, as well as essential to the project of “feeding the world.” It’s a powerful pitch.

Maize 140
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Can Biden’s climate-smart agriculture program live up to the hype?

Food Environment and Reporting Network

billion to hundreds of agriculture organizations, corporations, universities, and nonprofits for climate-smart projects. These practices include reducing or eliminating tilling of soil, planting “cover crops” that grow during the off-season and are not harvested, improving how farmers use fertilizer and manure, and planting trees.