Daily Food & Agriculture Digest
Every day, the staff of the Genetic Literacy Project scours the Web for stories on a range of agricultural and food issues, including the GMO debate, conventional and organic farming, regulations, new breeding technologies and sustainability. We publish excerpts of those stories and encourage our readers to visit the original publications for the complete stories.
Canada’s food regulator finds herbicide glyphosate on 30 percent of samples — But only 1.3 percent above ‘acceptable’ limit
Canada's food regulator has found traces of the controversial herbicide glyphosate in nearly 30 percent of about 3,200 food products ...
Does the administration’s block of the chlorpyrifos pesticide ban signal a changing regulatory landscape?
One of the first things this administration did was to rescind a government proposal to ban a pesticide used on ...
Understanding toxicity: Caffeine ’40 times more toxic’ than glyphosate herbicide
[Editor's note: Alison Bernstein is a neuroscientist who studies the role of epigenetics and environmental exposures in Parkinson’s disease.] LD50 ...
GMO labeling could be top line on Sonny Perdue’s menu once confirmed as secretary of agriculture
Should Sonny Perdue be confirmed as the next secretary of Agriculture, it will fall to him to end the biggest ...
Activist-fueled ‘over-regulation’ of GMO research stymies potential to feed the world
[Editor's note: Dr. Amjad M. Husaini is a professor of biotechnology at the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology in India.] ...
How CRISPR gene editing will ‘supercharge’ agriculture
[J]ust as corn helped create these civilizations, these civilizations helped create corn through meticulous selective breeding. Today’s grain hardly resembles ...
Gene salad: First comprehensive genome assembly of lettuce reveals ‘treasure-trove of genetic information’
UC Davis researchers announced in Nature Communications that they have unlocked a treasure-trove of genetic information about lettuce and related plants, releasing ...
Oregon bill to allow local governments to regulate GMO crops fails again
Local governments in Oregon will continue to be prohibited from regulating genetically engineered crops. Bills to ease the ban both ...
Trump’s deregulation push could undermine trust in safety of our food system
Pro-agriculture conservatives seem to be welcoming Trump’s push for deregulation because they felt Obama-era policies on GMOs and school lunch ...
Africa’s biotechnogy sector crippled by lack of electricity
Money is power, the saying goes. Sure enough, the fraction of GDP invested into science and technology (S&T) is a ...
New EU independent herbicide glyphosate study shows no toxic effects or genetic changes
Results of a new animal study into possible health risks of the weedkiller glyphosate will be published in time to ...
Urban ‘treatment-free’ beekeeping leads to explosion in killer Varroa mites
[Editor's note: Toni Burnham runs one of 10 hives at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC.] In this season of vitriol ...
Rotten tomato: Senator Rand Paul misses mark targeting tastier tomatoes as wasteful research
[Editor’s note: Kevin Folta is a molecular biologist and chair of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida.] Senator [Rand] ...
Jack in the corn stalk: Record 45-foot-tall corn plant created by New York breeder
Gason Karl has been growing corn since he was a teenager. Starting in 1996, he began planting the crop on ...
Biotech and non-GMO crops may need less separation than believed to prevent ‘contamination’
“Trying to figure out how far GM pollen will travel is really difficult,” says study co-author Rebecca Tyson, associate professor ...
Conventional (GMOs) vs organic farming: Which is better for animals and the environment?
[Editor's note: Iida Ruishalme is a writer and a science communicator from Sweden who holds a M.Sc. in Biology.] I ...
A crucial climate mystery is just under our feet
[F]armers could turn their fields into giant greenhouse gas sponges, potentially offsetting as much as 15 percent of global fossil ...
Has Big Ag funding corrupted Canadian chemical and pesticide safety research?
A Fellow of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences, [Len] Ritter is one of Canada’s leading experts on the effects of ...
Tree vaccine: ‘Weaponized’ GM virus could save Florida citrus industry from greening disease
Florida’s citrus growers are running out of time. Since 2005, when a deadly disease called citrus greening first showed up ...
How Cargill flubbed its non-GMO labeling partnership, angering farmers and consumers
As soon as Cargill announced that an outside group had certified more than a dozen of its ingredients as non-GMO, ...
Tomatoes resistant to fungus and blight developed by 94-year-old West Virginia scientist
Mannon Gallegly, West Virginia University professor emeritus of plant pathology, has made it his mission to develop a disease-free tomato ...
EU Food Safety Authority: Risk from pesticide residue on foods low, unlikely to pose health risk
[Editor's note: The following is from the EFSA's 2015 European Union report on pesticide residues in food, published April 11, ...
Autonomous robot cornfield scanner reveals how individual crops respond to climate change
Allow me to introduce you to Vinobot, the little rover on a mission to make sure crops weather global warming ...
Hobbyist beekeeping practices and rejection of chemical treatments major driver of bee-killing Varroa mites and disease
Hobby beekeeping is very common. A European Bee Health Report found that in many countries, the majority of beekeepers pursue the activity ...
Hawaii documentary claims presence of Big Ag GMO test facilities forces islands to import food
Did you know that the state of Hawaii imports between 80 and 90 percent of its food? This is, among ...
Is the US unwittingly funding anti-agriculture and anti-Monsanto conspiracy theories?
There is an organization that is using [US] tax dollars and they have replaced fact-based science with conspiracy theories and ...
Biodiversity on the farm: It’s more complicated than you might think
[Editor's note: William Price is a statistician in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Idaho ...
