President Donald Trump managed to sneak a few minutes from his busy schedule of threatening federal investigators to make official his nominee for the United States Department of Agriculture’s top scientific position on Wednesday. Given the tough choice between filling the role with a scientist or someone who is not a…
Diamondback moths may be a mere half-inch in length, but their voracious appetite for Brussels sprouts, kale and cauliflower make them a major pain for farmers. This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a potential solution: moths genetically engineered to contain a special gene that makes them gradually…
Trump’s 2018 budget proposal is out, and unsurprisingly, the cuts are huge. Some anticipated crazy cuts to the United States Department of Agriculture’s social program. Those cuts still exist, of course—this is President Donald Trump, after all. But what the new budget really shows as far as agriculture goes is that…
There are a few of generalizations we can probably make about meat. First, meat production is bad for the animal. Second, meat production is bad for the environment. Third, meat tastes good.
Back on a crisp January day in 2016, I slipped around on a frozen lake in Wisconsin to ask a bunch of portly men in grey hoodies and trucker hats how the fishing had been compared to when they were kids. Secretly, I wanted to know what they thought about the changing climate. The men had various backgrounds, many of…
Climate change is bad, beef is bad, everything is bad, yadda yadda. But Americans ate less beef between 2005 and 2014, which kept a lot of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, according to a new study. Maybe cutting back on those hamburgers is actually doing something good for the environment.
Chicken farmers in Tennessee are about to shed a lot of blood. After noticing an unusually high death rate in a flock, some Tyson Foods-suppliers discovered that they were dealing with a new bird flu outbreak. Don’t worry too much, though: The USDA says humans should be safe.
Olive oil is clearly worse than butter, but the media’s got bad news for those who have made the wrong choice about which form of grease to cover their bread with. An especially crappy year of bad weather and bacteria have sent every other news outlet panicking after the prices went up, like, a little bit.
The agricultural industry has long been considered an enemy of humanity when it comes to recklessly pumping antibiotics into animals. In further evidence that this practice is fueling a public health crisis, a new study has found a disconcerting trend at Chinese farms: flies are spreading the gene that gives bacteria…
Gene editing research is moving quickly in China—researchers there have already edited human embryos, after all. But a team of scientists now have their sights set on the food supply. Ladies, gentelmen, etc., meet the first crop of tuberculosis resistant, genetically moo-dified cows.
Folks at the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service received an email Monday morning from their chief of staff telling them not to talk to the public about their work.
If you wanted to, say, turn a red pepper yellow, you have a few options. You could directly tinker with with the plant’s genetic code, tweaking the genes that control its color. Or, perhaps, you could just mist the plant with a spray that changes its gene expression without altering its genetics.
On January 1, a set of long-awaited FDA rules went into effect that could mark a major shift in the agency’s approach to antibiotics for livestock animals. First, the new policies place an outright ban on the use of any antibiotics considered “medically important” to help animals gain weight. The rules also require…
Last week, Nigerian officials seized over 100 bags of what was claimed to be plastic rice. Lab tests have since shown the product isn’t fake, as Gizmodo and other outlets reported. But it is badly contaminated rice that’s unsafe for human consumption. The incident is casting light on the sorry state of the economy and…
Cities will grow alongside growing populations, turning the land in their wake into housing and infrastructure. And when that happens, we can goodbye to the food, a new study warns.
New research shows that a repeat of 1930s drought conditions would be comparably destructive to US crops, despite modern agricultural techniques. The news gets considerably worse in light of climate change.
Agriculture company Monsanto has acquired a non-exclusive global licensing agreement from MIT’s Broad Institute and Harvard to use the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing system. The firm will use it to design and grow new seeds and plants, but there are key restrictions on its use to prevent Monsanto from abusing this…
A relatively small number of crops make up a lot of the world’s diet. But, as the world gets hotter, the places that we’re able to grow these crops is moving.
Hope you’re ready to face the day with nothing but your own unsharpened wits about you. Soon, they will be all you have left.
The whitefly is kind of cute looking as far as invasive pests go, but they’ve recently been expanding their reach and are presenting a new threat to landscapers, gardeners, and farmers in the United States.
