On a bright sunny day early this spring Evrett Lunquist and Ruth Chantry were busy moving flats full of vegetable plants from their greenhouse to outdoor gardens for transplanting. Common Good Farm, Lincoln, Nebraska, grows over 45 different vegetables and herbs for...
“Science” is derived from the scire – “to know”. Each of us should know what we are eating, how it was produced, what impact it has on our health. The knowledge we need for growing food is knowledge of biodiversity and living seed, of...
Farming Microbes What if farmers, instead of picking up some agricultural chemicals at their local dealer, picked up a load of agricultural microbes instead? It's something to contemplate, because some big names in the pesticide business — like Bayer and...
“A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a song bird.” As a long time environmental lawyer and campaigner, I should not have been stunned by that fact but I was. Shaking my head in dismay, I read on, “Even a tiny grain of wheat or...
On April 1, California Governor Jerry Brown stood in a field in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, beige grass stretching out across an area that should have been covered with five feet of snow. The Sierra’s snowpack — the frozen well that feeds California’s reservoirs and...
The open burning of rice straw is an age-old problem. Commonly practiced by farmers in Egypt and Asia as a cheap way to clear the fields for the next season, it emits a smoky haze of fine particulate matter and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and...
