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Inside dozens of bankers boxes, stacked high in a storage locker in New York City, Cynthia Rosenzweig has stashed the work of decades: Legal pads covered in blue-inked cursive with doodles in the margins, file folders marked “potato,” graph paper with notations of rainfall in Nebraska and Kansas.
New research looks at the way climate change will impact crop yields and foods rich in micronutrients like zinc, vitamin A, and iron, putting low- and middle-income countries at increased risk of malnutrition.
Making tractors burn with less pollution has long posed a trade-off: cleaner air, but less power to drag heavy equipment. Now manufacturers say they’re making strides to help close the gap. The latest entrant is a biomethane- and electric-powered tractor from the AUGA Group, a Lithuanian organic food company that represents European farm machinery manufacturers. The combination of biomethane and electricity allows to the tractor to run as long as 12 hours, the company said when it announced the development in late September.
A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, a members-only monthly newsletter from Civil Eats. To read the full issue, with exclusive reporting,…
One weekend in late June, I drove with friends to Yolo County, California, a rural area in the Sacramento Valley. It was the second day of a multiday heat wave, and temperatures approached the triple digits. The road shimmered. In the passenger seat, a friend, seven months pregnant, wondered aloud whether it was safe for her to be outside.
In early summer, a day laborer laying irrigation lines at a plant nursery just south of Portland, Ore., collapsed to the ground and died. His official cause of death was declared “heat related.”
Increasing land cover diversity in agricultural landscapes is about more than protecting nature: it could also increase crop yields across large areas of the United States by up to 20%, according to a recent Nature Food study. Studies at the farm-level have previously shown that incorporating diverse land cover—features like hedgerows and flower borders—onto the land can help to boost agricultural productivity.
As farmers grapple with climate change, many are turning to regenerative agriculture practices. These techniques help store carbon in the soil and make the land more resilient to extreme weather. The approach is increasingly popular, but not new.
President Joe Biden’s goal of paying farmers and ranchers to help battle climate change is running into the reality of how complicated and costly it will be. Six months into the administration, officials have yet to unveil their plan. That’s in part because it’s logistically complex and difficult to make the economics work: While corporations are eager to buy credits that pay farmers to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and into their soil, the credits aren’t yet lucrative enough to entice enough farmers to rethink how they grow crops to maximize capturing carbon.
What if all it took to make a dent in agriculture’s contribution to climate change was to pay farmers not to farm?