homehome Home chatchat Notifications


If the whole world ate like America, we wouldn't have enough land in the world

We need to be more responsible -- starting from our plates.

Study weighs environmental costs of producing animal proteins so you know what to buy

Now you know exactly what your purchases do.

Humanity has contended with rising seas before -- and it didn’t go well for us

It's a bad day when the ocean moves into your living room.

Researchers create the 'crop hotspot' map of Mars so we know where to settle

All work and no food would make the colonists very sad. Also very, very dead.

Using rocks for farming could improve soil quality, reduce CO2 emissions

The practice could reduce the need for pesticides, improve soil quality, and absorb carbon dioxide.

Europe's first farmers mingled with the locals, slowly mixing the communities together

Until now, we didn't know if the two greeted with a handshake or a bloodbath.

Reinventing rice: New saltwater rice developed in China could feed over 200 million people

It could make a big difference in many parts of the world.

Smartphone AI spots sick plants with remarkable accuracy

In a new advancement, scientists developed an algorithm that can identify sick plants based on sight alone.

German researchers release open-source tomato and wheat seeds to boost research

Nice!

Early farmers probably didn't really know how to select crops -- but they were very lucky

Domestication could've well happened on its own.

Barley's full genome sequenced after decade-long research effort

A tiny plant with a lot of genes.

Farms could slash pesticide use without losing any yield or money, new study finds

More and more evidence is piling up against the use of pesticides.

UN scientists denounce 'myth' that we need pesticides to feed the world

Can we feed the world without pesticides?

Harvest in the US to suffer from climate change

As the newly elected president Trump starts his crusade of bashing environmentalism, a new study shows that climate change will affect US agriculture -- whether we admit it or not.

New robot picks peppers like a human

Robots are getting smarter and smarter.

Mixed legume and cereal crops don't need fertilizer to yield a lot of food

Farm smart not hard.

Crop spray boosts wheat yield by 20% without the use of GMOs

The improvement is simply astonishing.

New farm in the middle of the desert will use only sunlight and seawater - no pesticides, fossil fuels, or even soil

The sun and the sea - that's all it needs.

Crops employ "austerity measures" to conserve water in drought conditions

By limiting the growth of their roots, grassy crops conserve soil water during drought.

Vegetables grown on Mars could be healthier than their Earth-grown counterparts

Food grown on Mars has been officially declared edible.

Our best bet at stopping food waste is to be more responsible, not more efficient

Humans are throwing away an insane quantity of food, both in the developed and in developing countries. While in the latter case this can be attributed to economic and technological constrains, the former is primarily consumer-driven. And the sum of individual choices adds up to major impacts on a global scale, a new study finds.

How feeding pigs with leftovers can save the rainforest

In 2001 a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in the United Kingdom was traced back to a farmer that illegally fed uncooked waste to his pigs. It left the country's agricultural industry in tatters -- over 10 million sheep and cattle were killed in an effort to contain the disease. Later that year EU legislators banned the use of human food waste (or swill) as pig feed, a decision that is now coming under a lot of fire from disgruntled livestock farmers and the scientific community.

Six initiatives for sustainable agriculture announced at COP21

Climate change and agriculture are so interrelated that you basically can't talk about addressing climate change without bringing agriculture into the mix. At COP21, the climate summit in Paris, governments, NGOs and private entities joined hands to announce several initiatives focusing on some of the most pressing issues in agriculture: soils in agriculture, the livestock sector, food losses and waste, and sustainable production methods and resilience of farmers.

Study finds most people would support a "meat tax"

Agriculture is a big driver of climate change, with the meat industry standing out among the rest as a source of CO2 emissions and environmental damage; lowering demand for meat or ensuring that farms have as little environmental impact is possible, but costly. Would you be willing to eat less, if it was for the good of the planet? Pay more for your meat? A new study suggests that the idea isn't as controversial as you may believe on first glance.

Start-up develops new robot that identifies and removes weeds

Start-up company Deepfield Robotics has developed a field vehicle that can distinguish weeds from useful crops and eliminate them.

Orphan gene boosts the protein levels of crops

A recent study from Iowa State University shows how a gene, found in a single plant species so far, can increase protein content when grafted into the DNA of staple crops. Their findings could help improve a huge variety of crops and improve nutrition in developing parts of the world, where available sources of protein are sometimes limited.

Agricultural behaviors recorded in bees for the first time

Cristiano Menezes of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation has discovered farming behaviors in bees, adding them to the list of social insects that practice agriculture.

Florida quarantines farmlands to contain the Oriental Fruit Fly

Florida's farmlands are under attack by a highly destructive pest, the Oriental Fruit Fly, and authorities have quarantined some 85 square miles of land and the food grown there in an effort to contain the insect.

Crops farmed by leafcutter ants show signs of domestication: Leafcutter ants became farmers 50 million years before humans

Leafcutter ants in South America grow fungus as crops, this has been known for quite a while. But their crops show clear signs of domestication, which means that when it comes to farming, the ants might have beaten us by some 50 million years. Ant farmers When people started growing crops, they unwittingly made changes […]

Ever-growing population and climate instability will lead to severe food shortages by 2050

The food industry has become much more efficient in the last few decades as a result of globalization, but also a lot more vulnerable to shocks. Climate change will lead not only to increased temperatures, but the extreme weather it causes in North, South America and Asia are likely to also lead to global food shortages.

And then I threw it on the ground: first signs of farming come from the middle east, some 23,000 years ago

Who, where and when "invented" farming? A new study pushes back the advent of farming by a couple of thousand years.

Humans bones became lighter and frailer once farming became widespread

Our bones are much lighter and weaker than those of our Paleolithic ancestors (11,000 to 33,000 years ago), but it's not our spoiled modern day lifestyle that's to blame. Instead, a new study which closely compared homo sapiens bones, both ancient and modern, found that the most significant changes occurred once the paradigm shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture took place, some 10,000 years ago. Humans started forming permanent settlements, worked the land and tended to flocks. Consequently, the lifestyle became more sedentary.

The farmers of the future will be all robots

By 2050, world population is expected to rise to nine billion, but the amount of arable land meant to grow food will remain mostly the same as it stands today. As such, a 25% increase in productivity is mandated to support not just a growing populace, but also a wealthier one - as income inequality is coming down in developing countries, we're also seeing a sharp increase in meat consumption, for instance. Genetically modified organisms and waste management are just a few paramount solutions. At the same time, productivity stems from agricultural processes and some modern farmers are already integrating the latest technology to increase their yields and cut costs. Twenty years from now, expect your oranges and corn to be 100% sown, grown and harvested by robots.

Antarctic Ice Collapse Could Devastate Global Food Supply

We’ve already written about the damage done to the Antarctic ice sheet, and how sadly, its collapse seems irreversible. A new study has analyzed some of the consequences of that collapse – it could devastate global food supply, drowning vast areas of crop lands across the Middle East and Asia. The report urges the Obama administration […]

Manure was used by European farmers 8000 years ago

A new study has shown that European farmers used far more sophisticated practices than was previously thought. The Oxford research found that Neolithic farmers used manure as a fertilizer as early as 6000 BC. It has been previously assumed that manure wasn’t used in agriculture until Roman times. This technique is fairly complex, because dung […]

Cheese has a 7500 year history

Polish researchers have found the earliest evidence of prehistoric cheese-making from a study of 7,500-year-old pottery fragments that are perforated much like today’s modern cheese strainers. When early men figured out how to make cheese, it was a big thing; at that time, livestock was too precious to use just for the meat, and mankind […]

Genetically engineered crops reach 11.5% of the total arable land

The first genetically engineered or biotech food products were released on the market for the first time in 1994. Consumers received them fairly well, and since then more production intensified, such that between 1997 and 2010, the total surface area of land cultivated with GMOs had increased by a factor of 87. In 2011, biotech […]