Daily Food & Ag 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.
Glyphosate harms soil microbes? USDA research challenges common criticism of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide
There are dozens of conspiracy theories about glyphosate. One of those theories goes something like this: glyphosate, the active ingredient ...
Nearly half of US fruit growers want biotech crops, survey shows, but fear consumers won’t buy GMO products
And you thought growers could go on and on about problems with the weather, or their employees, or any of ...
CRISPR immunizes chickens against deadly virus, potentially boosting global egg and meat production
CRISPR genome editing has been used to make chickens resistant to a common virus. The approach could boost egg and ...
Have regulators failed to address agriculture’s fertilizer pollution problem?
Everywhere Randy Souder looked, he saw mud. On his soggy fields. In the mechanized crannies of his planter. Along the ...
Reforestation: Climate change solution or ‘ecosystem disservice’? Depends where you plant the trees
Reforestation is an important part of tackling climate change, but it seems we need to think carefully about where we ...
We can sustainably feed 3.4 billion people. Study shows 4 eco-friendly farming practices will help produce food for 10 billion
Global agriculture puts heavy pressure on planetary boundaries, posing the challenge to achieve future food security without compromising Earth system ...
Natural GMOs: Study shows that 12 popular foods were genetically modified by mother nature
Even though no one has found any evidence that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are harmful, anti-GMO activists have campaigned against ...
Vertical farms, lab-grown meat: The sustainable future of food, or ‘wishful thinking’?
Farmers have grown food in roughly the same way for thousands of years .... Now, entrepreneurs say they have a ...
Saving seafood: Lab-grown microalgae could help sustain the world’s overfished oceans
Oceans once teeming with life are being whittled away. Larger, predatory fish – salmon and tuna included – are now ...
Natural pest-control market could hit $10 billion by 2025, as farmers seek new tools to battle pesticide-tolerant bugs
For decades, Adam Baldwin’s family used chemicals with multisyllabic names to keep caterpillars such as earworms and podworms from chomping ...
EPA to decide the future of dicamba, neonicotinoids and other controversial pesticides in 2020
The EPA this year will deliver important decisions to U.S. agriculture, including on chlorpyrifos, glyphosate, the neonicotinoids, pyrethroids, atrazine and ...
Luxembourg outlines plan to ban glyphosate weed killer in January 2021
The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is in the process of becoming the first country to ban the use of the ...
Bayer close to settling more than 75,000 glyphosate-cancer lawsuits, mediator says
Bayer AG’s settlement of cancer lawsuits over its Roundup weed-killer may be only weeks away and is likely to cover ...
Improved seeds key to sustainable food security, African plant breeders say
Strategies now being rolled out to ensure food security on the African continent are unsustainable, according to the African Plant ...
Using GMO technology to restore the blight-devastated American chestnut: State University of New York awarded breakthrough $3.2 million Templeton Foundation grant
[The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry] has received its largest-ever charitable gift, $3.2 million, ...
Pushback against studies challenging health risks of meat consumption highlights industry influence on nutrition research
It’s almost unheard of for medical journals to get blowback for studies before the data are published. But that’s what ...
CRISPR gene editing yields corn resistant to widely used sulfonylurea herbicide, study shows
Researchers from Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and other institutions reported precise based editing of maize genes using CRISPR-Cas9, leading ...
EU Green Party aims to halve synthetic pesticide use by 2025, phase it out completely in 15 years
The EU’s European Green Deal drafters may have succeeded in dodging some of the most immediately contentious issues in the ...
10 things you should know about Impossible Foods’ new GMO plant-based ‘pork’
Here comes the other faux white meat. Impossible Foods, the brand behind [2018's] Impossible Burger 2.0 craze, captivated the attention ...
How good storytelling can help consumers see the benefits of GMOs, synthetic biology
Synthetic biology is a field full of exciting stories .... I asked Karl Schmieder, a seasoned communications and strategy consultant ...
Plant growth ‘on/off’ switch could help safeguard crop yields as farmers battle climate change
New research from UC Riverside identifies a protein that controls plant growth -- good news for an era in which ...
Viewpoint: ‘Conspiracy theorist’ Zen Honeycutt spins tall tales about GMOs, glyphosate weed killer on CBS Los Angeles
If the media has a question about biomedical science, one would assume that a scientist or doctor would be the ...
Biotech marijuana: Israeli startups aim to breed cannabis plant that’s easier to cultivate
Israeli medical cannabis company Cann10 has signed an agreement to team up with Israeli biotech company Epigenetics to form Cann10 ...
EU bans Bayer neonicotinoid insecticide thiacloprid, citing threat to human reproductive health, bees
The European Commission decided on [Jan. 13] not to renew approval for a pesticide linked to harming bees, effectively banning ...
With 92% of U.S. corn coming from GMO plants, farmers see yield boom despite severe flooding
Under pressure from soggy fields, late planting and bouts of early winter weather, American corn and soy plants proved resilient ...
Eat less meat to cut CO2 emissions? That may not make your diet climate friendly, study shows
In global diets, meat is not necessarily the main driver of dietary carbon emissions, finds a new study published in ...
Bayer attorney says televising upcoming glyphosate-cancer trial could threaten Monsanto employees’ safety
Letting TV cameras into a trial over the safety of Roundup herbicide might put witnesses and employees at Bayer AG’s ...
