Kickstarter is a website where people give money to support creative projects. It started in two thousand nine, mostly to help artists and musicians. Now, inventors, people starting businesses and a growing number of farmers are raising money on this site for crowd-sourced funding. Josh Brill and Meadow Squire grow vegetables and rice in Tinmouth, […]
Scientists have made a genetic map of the tomato. Tomatoes are second only to potatoes as the world’s most valuable vegetable crop. Eight years of work went intomaking the map, or genome. Three hundred scientists around the world took part in the project to sequence the tomato’s DNA code. Giovanni Giuliano, a researcher in Italy, is […]
Leaders and officials from governments and nongovernmental groups recently met in Brazil for the Rio+20 Conference. The full name was the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. It marked the twentieth anniversary of the Earth Summit, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro. It also came ten years after the […]
When is a plant considered a weed? Experts at Penn State University have a simple answer: When its undesirable qualities outweigh its good qualities. Consider the fact that crops generally produce several hundred seeds from each plant. But each weed plant can produce tens or even hundreds of thousands of seeds. And some buried seeds […]
Most kinds of rose plants are native to Asia. But roses also grow in other parts of the world including northwest Africa, Europe and the United States. In nineteen eighty-six, Congress and President Ronald Reagan declared the rose as America’s “national floral emblem.” They proclaimed it the national flower, in other words. But whatever the name, the choice […]
North Kivu is a war-torn province that used to be called the breadbasket of the Congo. Now, some farmers are being trained to increase their productivity with fertilizer. The International Fertility Development Center is supporting the project. The IFDC is anonprofit group based in the United States. The project includes planting trees. Trees help prevent the loss of soil through […]
Food prices have risen sharply over the past few years. The good news is that the rate of increase has slowed. The bad news is that prices will not go down anytime soon. Also, the rate of global agricultural production is slowing. Yet it needs to increase sixty percent over the next forty years to […]
The United States is suffering its worst drought in almost sixty years. Moderate to extreme dry conditions spread to fifty-five percent of the continental United States in June. That was the most since December of nineteen fifty-six. The National Climatic Data Center also says high temperatures in June added to the warmest twelve-month period on […]
A drought across much of the United States is forcing farmers to make difficult decisions. Damage to corn and soybeans is already severe in the hardest-hit areas. Alan Bowers Junior is a farmer in the state of Illinois in the Midwest. ALAN BOWERS JR.: “You get up in the morning, and you think it might be another […]
America is the world’s largest food exporter. But the worst drought in half a century is hitting corn and wheat harvests. The drought across the central United States adds to concerns about world food supplies and prices in the coming years. Experts say by 2050, the world will have to produce at least 60 percent […]