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...
Policy makers should value environmental, health benefits of small-scale local farming, researcher argues
Is biodiverse agriculture an anachronism? Or is it a vital part of a food-secure future?
Given the need to feed an estimated 2.4 billion more people by the year 2050, the drive toward large-sc...
Uncertainty over a new US Farm Bill is likely over as the House of Representatives, in a bipartisan move, passed the Agricultural Act of 2014. The Senate still has to approve it but the bill is expected to pass through smoothly. An earlier version of this bill passed the Senate in 2012 but...
Breakthrough Technology Enables Crops To Take Nitrogen From The Air — Effective Means To Replace Nitrogen Fertilizers Developed
A potentially “world-changing” technology has been developed by researchers at the University of Nottingham — a means of enabling any type of crop to take nitrogen from th...
Washington, DC--(ENEWSPF)--July 24, 2013. Gina McCarthy, a veteran environmental regulator and President Obama’s pick to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), finally had her appointment confirmed by the U.S. Senate after an almost five month delay imposed by Senate Republicans. ...
How many mouths will the world be feeding by 2050? It is an estimated 9.2 billion, up from 7 billion today. To keep pace with this growing population, global food production will need to increase by 70 percent.
That means getting a lot smarter about how we raise crops. With 38 percent of the w...
The UK Government hopes to make Britain a world leader in agricultural science and technology following the launch of a new strategy to deliver sustainable, healthy and affordable food for future generations.
Breakthroughs in nutrition, informatics, satellite imaging, remote sensing, meteorology an...
Last Monday the European Union deputy ambassadors voted to accept evidence available that confirms the link between pesticides and bee deaths. The vote took place in Brussels, where they were forced to act quickly to set forth a ban for a minimum of at least two years on the pesticides that sc...
One quarter of the US' rivers and streams have fish with elevated mercury.
At least our rivers don’t light on fire anymore. Inspired by a well-publicized fire on the Cuyahoga River in 1969, the passage of the Clean Water Act in the US led to huge reductions in water pollution. Despite those positiv...
The American public has slowly awakened over the past several years to the creep of genetically modified and genetically engineered crops into the food supply.
Now a provision in a bill signed into law Tuesday by President Barack Obama has thrust GMOs into the spotlight, pr...
