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.
Idaho GMO sugar beet farmers mull ditching crop as more food companies adopt non-GMO label
Idaho sugar beet farmers have grown increasingly dependent on genetically modified seeds for cost savings and greater yields over the ...
Australia’s organic industry should drop ‘zero tolerance’ of GM food contamination, farmers group says
Flood waters have swept through parts of WA's grain growing region, sparking concern from some certified organic growers that contamination ...
Precision agriculture: How big data can make farms more sustainable
Farmers have numerous sources of technology and data available to use in their operations, but many producers struggle with what ...
1 in 3 Scottish farmers blame ban of neonicotinoid pesticides for rapeseed crop damage
More than a third of Scottish arable farmers say the ban on neonicotinoids has resulted in greater damage to oilseed ...
No, your body does not absorb genetic material from eating GM foods
A major new study ... has found no evidence that genetic material from the food we eat is absorbed via ...
Can GMOs mitigate threats to global food security?
[Editor's note: Stuart Thompson is a senior lecturer in plant biochemistry at the University of Westminster in the UK.] Crops ...
Video: Agricultural robot roams fields to monitor crops and their DNA
A semiautonomous robot may soon be roaming agricultural fields gathering and transmitting real-time data about the growth and development of ...
World’s largest flower is a parasite that, surprisingly, exchanges genes with its host
[Editor's note: Critics of transgenic GMO crops often argue that the movement of genetic material from one species to another ...
Can insect-resistant Bt corn help African farmers fight invasive armyworm?
African nations are gearing up to battle an invasive crop pest called the fall armyworm, which has been rapidly spreading ...
Virus-resistant potato genetically engineered with RNAi developed but not near commercialization
RNA interference (RNAi) technology has been successfully applied in stacking resistance against viruses in numerous crop plants. During RNAi, the ...
Google delisted Mike Adams’ Natural News website for ‘sneaky’ marketing, not content
It became apparent that “Natural News” had been removed from Google search results on February 22 [2017]. The website did ...
Whole Foods, Patagonia, Clif Bar school lunch program promotes misconceptions about pesticides, seed saving
[Editor's note: Stephan Neidenbach is a middle school teacher, father, and blogger.] The Conscious Kitchen program (funded by Patagonia, Clif ...
European Union ‘dragging its feet’ on gene-edited crop regulations
Plant scientists say that new editing tools, including CRISPR–Cas9, involve no more than making tiny, precisely targeted changes to a ...
US corn farmers switching to more-profitable soybeans to meet rising demand in China
Planting decisions for U.S. corn and soybean farmers are a bit of a no-brainer this year. After confronting the prospects ...
Super pigs: CRISPR gene-edited virus-resistant pigs could cut piglet deaths, pork prices
Scientists have created a new breed of super pigs resistant to a killer virus... They now have two generations of ...
Widely-held belief that food production must double by 2050 to feed growing population ‘not supported by data’
"Food production must double by 2050 to feed the world's growing population." This truism has been repeated so often in ...
Bayer takeover of Monsanto delayed as US, European regulators seek more information on deal
The German drugmaker will only seek approval for the transaction in the European Union next quarter after regulators there requested ...
Commercialization, research on ‘home-grown’ GMO crops backed by Kenyan lawmakers
Kenyan crop researchers are free to start commercial growing of Genetically Modified (GMO) cotton, the country’s lawmakers said on Tuesday ...
Did Google do the right thing in blocking Natural News from searches?
[Editor’s note: Read the GLP’s profile on Natural News founder Mike Adams. Also: FBI turns up heat on Mike Adams ...
Flood of organic imports has US farmers concerned, asking for more scrutiny of overseas growers
Organic grain is flooding into the U.S., depressing prices and drawing complaints from domestic organic farmers who fear their harvests ...
Trump’s threatened ‘trade war’ with Mexico could undermine US GMO corn market
[Editor's note: More than 90% of the US corn market is GMO — a combination of herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant varieties.] ...
Rice plants could be genetically tweaked to tame arsenic found in soil, reducing risk for humans
Rooted in place, plants can’t run away from arsenic-tainted soil — but they’re far from helpless. Scientists have identified enzymes ...
Why eating soy protects some of us but not others from heart disease
A product of digesting a micronutrient found in soy may hold the key to why some people seem to derive ...
1 cigarette ‘more carcinogenic and toxic’ than a spoonful of glyphosate pesticide
[Editor's note: Matan Shelomi is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Entomology at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical ...
Chickens genetically engineered to act as surrogates could protect vulnerable breeds from avian flu
In a radical plan to preserve rare varieties [of chicken breeds] such as the Nankin, Scots Dumpy and Sicilian Buttercup, scientists ...
Genetically tweaked ‘seasonless’ broccoli may double yields
Scientists at the John Innes Centre are developing a new line of fast-growing sprouting broccoli that goes from seed to ...
Debunking Denialism: 5 environmental benefits from GMO crops
Editor's note: Emil Karlsson is a Swedish science communicator who runs the Debunking Denialism blog, which is dedicated to scientific skepticism ...
