Remove Fertilizer Remove Industrial Agriculture Remove Science
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Op-ed: The Food System Cannot Become Another Fossil-Fuel Industry Escape Hatch

Civil Eats

While the current administration may blame woke DEI environmentalists for the blazes, science shows that the climate crisis contributed to the severity of the damage. Growing vast monocultures of potatoes requires synthetic fertilizers whose production requires massive amounts of energy.

Food 119
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Ask a Scientist: What Value Do Wetlands Provide?

The Equation

Woods brings decades of experience in the application of spatial data science to her work studying the environmental and health impacts of the US food and agriculture system. While development, forestry, and climate change all contribute to wetland loss, draining for agriculture has been the single biggest cause since the 1800s.

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Op-ed: Big Ag Touts Its Climate Strengths, While Awash in Fossil Fuels

Civil Eats

Powerful PR firms have worked overtime in recent years to craft a narrative that highlight farms’ potential role in mitigating climate change, but the truth is that agriculture consumes 6 percent of the world’s fossil fuel energy , and the oil and gas industries rely on industrial agriculture for one of its largest and most lucrative markets.

Pesticide 143
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Illinois Dust Storm Disaster Is a Warning for Agriculture

The Equation

Because like the Dust Bowl of so many decades ago, this tragedy stemmed from a collision of multiple systemic problems—in this case, unchecked climate change layered atop the excesses of industrial agriculture. Fertilizer runoff can also affect urban communities downstream.

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Ask a Scientist: Stopping Big Ag from Hijacking US Farm and Food Policy

The Equation

Their suggested marker bills included provisions that would broaden access to US farm loans for historically underserved borrowers, help farmers address the climate crisis, better protect food and farm workers, halt industrial agriculture mergers by strengthening relevant antitrust laws, and expand SNAP benefits and government nutrition programs.

Food 121
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Farmers Can Adapt to Alternating Droughts and Floods—Here’s How

The Equation

Industrial agricultural practices such as tillage (plowing) and leaving fields bare between growing seasons degrade soil structure, reduce water infiltration, lower water storage capacity, and increase runoff (the flow of water across the soil’s surface).

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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 143