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.
Viewpoint: Mass litigation targeting glyphosate could put beet farmers out of business
Glyphosate is used on 98% of Idaho's sugar beet acres, allowing those farmers to contribute over $385 million to our ...
A lack of funding in agriculture is crippling Africa’s smallholder farms and exacerbating an already present food crisis
[D]espite the estimated 41 million smallholder farmers in Africa producing food, many countries are still grappling with food crisis. The ...
Viewpoint: Here’s why we need a globalized regulatory standard for gene-edited crops
International Seed Federation members are calling for harmonised regulations on new breeding technologies such as genome editing to accelerate impactful ...
With only insect resistant Bt cotton approved, India set to address fate of genetically modified mustard and cotton
New Delhi: The government has begun the process of drafting its long-delayed policy on genetically modified (GM) crops, having set ...
6 novel ways technology is addressing ‘planetary problems’, from making bacon-tasting insects to turning food waste into energy
Demanding times call for adaptive measures. As the world faces escalating challenges, UBC researchers are thinking outside the box to ...
Is the public ready to eat bacon from a gene-edited pig? It’s closer than you think
Gene-edited pigs resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) could be a commercial reality as soon as 2026 in ...
East African split on future of GM crops: Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda are planting while Congo, Rwanda Burundi, South Somalia and Tanzania remain hard against
The East African Community partner states have failed to strike consensus on the growing and use of genetically modified crops, ...
Enhanced creativity and improved focus: The rise of mushroom enhanced beverages is waking up public interest
Startup bros, alt-health gurus, and baristas have been trying to reinvent coffee for years. We’ve had bulletproof coffee, turmeric lattes, CBD coffee, ...
Is organic food healthier? European study says ‘yes’ in many cases, but are worse than conventional in others
In a recent review published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers compare the health impacts of consuming organic foods to ...
Do cage free egg hens really roam free outdoors? Challenging 10 egg myths
In this article, we'll crack open the top 10 egg health myths we thought were true but aren't, separating fact ...
Can AI and precision technology be integrated into most farm operations without lowering productivity?
Recent advancements in agtech solutions offer growers the promise of streamlining their farm operations, maximizing productive output, reducing costs and ...
Viewpoint: Have green, ecological, and environmental movements lost the plot? Why demonizing GMOs builds a toxic narrative
Environmentalism should be a serious movement: important, vital, and a harbinger of innovations. [...] ... Let's look at some examples ...
Sustainability will take a huge hit if Canada models its future agricultural production after Europe’s broken precautionary approach to innovation
The European Union is rejecting these proven strategies through policies that dramatically reduce fertilizer and chemical use and ban modern ...
Gluten-free wheat? Gene editing brings us one step closer to developing an alternative for people with Celiac Disease
Scientists from the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and the University of the Basque Country in Spain demonstrate the potential of gene ...
Decentralizing cell meat production: Could farmers actually produce cultivated meat on their own farms?
Science fiction down on the farm? What about this? Take some biopsies from live meat animals, put the cells, suspended ...
30 times increase in betacarotene in lettuce: Biofortification technique shown to dramatically increase a precursor to vitamin A
A research group from the Research Institute for Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology (IBMCP), a joint centre of the Spanish ...
‘Fearmongering’: Science magazine questions pediatrics academy’s recommendations to avoid foods with genetically modified ingredients
Guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) are a go-to source for practicing pediatricians and for some parents. But ...
A food of the future may already be here: The heat-resilient jackfruit variety breadfruit can survive erratic temperatures and hurricanes
Food systems across island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific are particularly vulnerable, being hit hard by a combination of ...
‘Meat designers’: How a start-up uses the patented 3D process ‘chaotic printing’ to lower the costs of cell-based meats
“We are meat designers,” says the Mexican startup Forma Foods, which crafts cow-less meat using a patented 3D printing process called ...
Canadian researchers in the early stages of developing effective and comparably inexpensive alternatives to glyphosate
Fifty-nine weed species around the world have developed some resistance to glyphosate, according to data from the International Survey of ...
Why consumers don’t know or care about the ‘regenerative agriculture’ movement so popular in progressive circles
The report, which surveyed US consumers from around the country, comes courtesy of Purdue’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and ...
Viewpoint: Marriage made in heaven? What would happen to science and farming if Trump wins and RFK, Jr. is rewarded with EPA cabinet post?
Could [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] serve inside a potential second Trump administration? ... Trump voters and disaffected Democrats don’t care ...
Video: How Chinese firms finance litigation disrupting intellectual property in biotech and food distribution system
The commodification of lawsuit funding [...] opens the door to even more bad faith participation in the justice system. ...
Sustainability impact of GM crops? Nuanced study suggests mostly positive environmental effects
When the researchers delved into the body of literature, it revealed an interesting push and pull between the benefits and ...
‘Banana apocalypse’? How disease resistant bananas can help overcome a global lack of genetic diversity
“[QCAV-4] is a Cavendish,” [Prof James Dale] says. “The bananas look the same, they feel the same, they peel the ...
Sustainable forestry: CRISPR-edited trees could boost fiber production efficiency and reduce the paper industry’s carbon footprint
Humans have domesticated numerous crops, but trees have largely escaped us. This is because breeding new tree varieties takes many decades ...
SynBio future in Africa: Kenya takes the lead in applying synthetic biology to improve agriculture and fight climate dislocations
Genome editing and synthetic biology are other exciting bioscience innovations that offer viable solutions to contemporary challenges in agriculture, human ...
