agriculture
kbonham | August 5, 2013
Can you be skeptical about GM but believe in climate change? So asks Alice Bell in The Guardian. The answer is of course, "Yes," but you can also be a fundamentalist Christian while believing in evolution and being a great scientist, so being able to hold two things in your brain at the same time is not a useful measure of logical incompatibility. One can be right about one thing and wrong about the other.
But let's get to the real issue raised in Bell's piece, the use of the term "anti-science" to describe opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs):
When people use the term "anti-…
jhalper | July 30, 2013Since the haiku post was well received, and since we have another three pieces online today – each on a different finding and each interesting in its own right – I have decided to return to the haiku format. Among other things, there is something quite satisfying about distilling complex scientific findings down to 17 little syllables – like writing the perfect tweet, but more so.
In any case, follow the links to read more:
A burst of enzymes:
A transcription traffic jam
Watch for gene speed bumps
Genetics can rid
The poison from potatoes
Or add it elsewhere
image: Thinkstock
To raise…
kkrisberg | July 12, 2013In a recent study comparing workers at industrial livestock operations and those employed at antibiotic-free livestock operations, researchers found that industrial workers were much more likely to carry livestock-associated strains of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, more commonly and scarily known as MRSA.
First, it's important to note that both groups of workers had a similar prevalence of S. aureus and methicillin-resistant S. Aureus (MRSA); however, it was overwhelmingly workers at industrial livestock operations, sometimes known as concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs,…
egrossman | June 6, 2013By Elizabeth Grossman
“If we could get growers to comply with the law, that would revolutionize agriculture in this country,” said United Farm Workers (UFW) national vice president Erik Nicholson explaining the circumstances that led to the creation of the Equitable Food Initiative. As Nicholson describes it, despite Americans’ intense interest in food and concern for their families’ health, most don’t think much – if at all – about the people who grow, pick and bring this food to market. And while most people not closely involved with agriculture assume that food is grown here under fair…
kbonham | June 1, 2013On Thursday, I had a post published on Scientific American's guest Blog about claims that genetically modified food crops could contain allergens. In it, I am critical of the Union of Concerned Scientists (a science advocacy and policy organization), for what I read as misplaced opposition to genetic engineering:
The UCS’s concern about the dire state of our food system is well-founded, and I applaud their efforts to get out in front of the policy debate. There’s just one problem: they oppose using all of our technology to help combat this problem. Specifically, I’m talking about genetic…
kbonham | May 14, 2013Ok, this is a little different, but it's annoying, so I'm going to talk about it.
Let me begin by saying I love the Union of Concerned Scientists. They've been wonderful advocates on climate change for decades; they are media savvy, they train scientists to be media savvy, and they push the media and policy makers alike to understand the scientific consensus. When it comes to climate change, I trust them over just about any other source.
Which is why it's so disappointing that they are so wrong on genetically modified organisms.
Several years ago, UCS decided to branch out into the science of…
pgleick | May 10, 2013The Colorado River, recently named America’s most endangered river, supports millions of people in the American Southwest and northwest Mexico and helps irrigate millions of acres of land. It is shared by seven states in the U.S. and Mexico, through a complex series of legal agreements and treaties.
Yet every drop of water on the river is accounted for, used, reused, and transpired away, and today, no water reaches the Colorado River delta in an average year. Quite simply, demands on the river exceed the river’s average supply, and this problem is projected to get worse as populations…
sastyk | March 7, 2013From Agrilife, apparently we're going to spend 3 million bucks to confirm the obvious - if you only breed for one thing, maximum milk production, you will be casting a lot of other critical traits to the winds:
“Fertility is a critical component of efficient dairy production,” Pinedo said. “Failure to attain and maintain a timely pregnancy is a major reason for production loss in dairy herds. Consequences of low fertility include a reduced percentage of cows at the early stages of lactation, increments in insemination costs, premature culling and delayed genetic progress.
“The decline in…
pgleick | February 21, 2013The Pacific Institute has done extensive and groundbreaking research over the past 25 years on a wide range of water, climate, energy, and environmental issues. One focus has been on how to use water more efficiently to do the things we want to do – a focus on “efficiency” and “productivity” – not deprivation.
Society could certainly cut water use by removing urban lawns, or never washing our cars again, or eliminating irrigated alfalfa in the desert. But we've never recommended these things. Why? Not because the water savings from such changes are small: some of these things can produce vast…
dr. dolittle | February 20, 2013
Image of rat teeth from Scienceline (credit: The International Rice Research Institute, flickr.com)
What does tooth decay have to do with rats? For Neandertals, tooth decay was a rare occurance. Research suggests that tooth decay became more prominent with the development of agriculture. Dr. Ordaz, Stanford School of Medicine, and colleagues analyzed common strains of bacteria (Streptococcus mutans) responsible for causing cavities. They found that the bacteria began expanding exponentially around 10,000 years ago, similar to the dawn of agriculture. The authors suggest that as humans…
lborkowski | February 19, 2013by Kim Krisberg
After nearly three decades as a USDA food safety inspector, Stan Painter tells me he now feels like "window dressing standing at the end of the line as product whizzes by."
Painter, a poultry inspector with the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) stationed in the northeast corner of Alabama in the town of Collinsville, is a first-hand witness to USDA's recently proposed rule to speed up poultry inspection lines while simultaneously reducing the number of federal food inspectors and turning over much of the food safety oversight to plant employees, who could have little…
sastyk | January 24, 2013Good review of the progress made by Vermont's Farm to Plate Initiative (a model I'm watching closely). One of the most challenging areas for local food expansion is moving into schools and hospitals - and yet, this is also where it is most needed. I'm also pleased to see the expanded program in VT law school - expanding the number of small farms is going to involve some major shifts in a whole host of areas governed by law:
In 2011 Fletcher Allen Hospital served more than 2 million meals, actually making hospital nutrition services the largest restaurant in Vermont. They partner with 70…
sastyk | January 18, 2013It is nice to see SRI Rice Production, a really important advance in sustainable, small scale grain production getting its due here in this Independent Science News article. Most fascinating, it covers ways in which the SRI model is being adapted to other grains and crops, and its potential utility.
The world record yield for paddy rice production is not held by an agricultural research station or by a large-scale farmer from the United States, but by Sumant Kumar who has a farm of just two hectares in Darveshpura village in the state of Bihar in Northern India. His record yield of 22.4 tons…
cmonforton | November 7, 2012Hurray! The Presidential election is over. Let's hope this means that Obama Administration officials will come out from under their beds and embrace their regulatory authority to issue some strong public health and environmental regulations. At the Labor Department (DOL) there's much work to do to expand workers' rights, ensure workers' lives and health are protected, and improve the information provided by its agencies. Leave a comment with your ideas for immediate action by the Labor Department.
Here's my short version of my wish list for major DOL activities for the next 6 months:
MSHA…
sastyk | October 5, 2012A reader asked me to comment on this video critiquing Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's challenge to Ontario consumers to spend ten more dollars a week on local, Ontario produced food. My first comment is that people who speak like affectless zombies probably should stick to the written word, rather than making videos, but that's more of an aesthetic critique. Beyond that, however, there is the tiny germ (if you can find it under the same old economist free market babble) of a real question - how much impact does switching our dollars into local foods and products actually have?
Most of the…
sastyk | September 28, 2012A few years back Stuart Staniford, (who is one of the most brilliant people I know) and I had a lively debate about the future of small scale agriculture over at The Oil Drum. Stuart argued that agriculture would continue to get bigger and more industrialized, because its fossil fuel dependency really wasn't that great. I argued that in fact energy and environmental pressures would push us back to smaller scale agriculture. So it is nice of Staniford to note that at least at this particular moment, there's a small general trend in my direction ;-):
I've circled the 4% increase between 2002…
sastyk | September 28, 2012From Simon Black at Business Insider:
The researchers’ analysis went a step further, though; they modeled the relationship between food prices and social unrest to reach a simple conclusion– whenever the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)’s global food price index climbs above 210, conditions ripen for social unrest.
Read more: http://www.sovereignman.com/expat/two-no-brainer-ways-to-play-rising-food-prices-8900/#ixzz27moSPcTK
We're currently at 213. Read the whole thing, including Black's exhortation to get a garden, at least. Not that that's news if you read here regularly.
Sharon
sastyk | September 24, 2012It is the nature of popular books to inspire people to wildly overstate their importance. The most stunning example is Abraham Lincoln's statement upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war.” While _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was an incredibly important book, one that moved many people to shift their sympathies on the subject of slavery, this was, of course, the wildest hyperbole. So too are claims that _Diet For a Small Planet_ invented modern vegetarianism, that _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ started the local foods movement. …
sastyk | September 6, 2012There has been a fair amount of hoohah about a Stanford Study that suggests that organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods. This shouldn't be a shock, but many health claims have been waved about over the years that say otherwise. The Atlantic's Brian Fung rightly points out that only over the last few years has the discussion shifted to imply that nutritional content is why we grow organic - in fact, that's not how the organic movement started. The reality is that such claims are hard to evaluate - what varieties are you comparing? Is this industrial or small scale…
lborkowski | August 29, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
What industry employs approximately 20 million Americans, or one out of five US private-sector workers, but whose median wage has workers taking home less than $20,000 a year? Clue: It’s the same industry in which it’s actually legal to pay $2.13 an hour, for workers who qualify as “tipped” employees. Answer: The food service industry, which includes agricultural and farmworkers, food processing and slaughterhouse employees, as well as those working in food distribution, retail, restaurants, and other food service businesses.
In a survey for a report released earlier…