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: Societal hypocrisy — Farmers face unfair criticism for the pesticides they judiciously use, while lethal chemicals used elsewhere are embraced
Why are bugs so difficult to get rid of? If you’ve ever had an infestation even in your own home, ...
Viewpoint: ‘One of the greatest human accomplishments’ — GM insect-resistant cowpea quintuples yields without pesticides
African farmers, especially smallholders, will need to achieve much higher yields than they do today. Fulfilling this will require concerted ...
From 2,000 to 330,000: Monarch butterfly count soars in California since 2020 low — but still far below millions in the 1980s
The population of western monarch butterflies wintering along the California coast has rebounded for a second year in a row ...
Viewpoint: Deciding between growing conventional or biotech crops in Africa? Here’s what farmers need to know
Corteva Agriscience’s developing marketing manager, Charles Matlou, expands on the types of biotech crops approved for commercialisation in South Africa ...
Big Meat is alive and thriving: Plant-based and cellular meat may be a commercial flop
Meatless meat, it turns out, seems less a world-changing innovation than another food trend whose novelty is wearing thin ...
Viewpoint: ‘Going organic isn’t cheap’ — What does it cost farmers to switch from conventional farming to organic?
Farmland has to stop using industrial-strength pesticides and fertilizers on land for three years before it can meet the U.S ...
Viewpoint: It’s time for consumers to get over the ‘ick factor’ of lab-created food
Many people feel weird about eating innovation, as if Big Biotech is ramming science down their throats. They cringe at ...
CRISPR co-creator: 2023 sees mobilization of gene editing to develop crops that resist climate change, as world food demand rises
Crispr is being used experimentally to increase yield, reduce pesticide and water use, and protect against disease. The next space ...
Viewpoint: Regenerative agriculture is the best way to overcome environmental impacts of conventional farming, claims Boston Consulting Group
Regenerative agriculture, we argue, is the only approach to farming that can overcome the agriculture industry’s status quo by significantly reducing the ...
Video: What does it take to feed the United States? Comparing organic and conventional crops and food
What does it take to feed a nation the size of the United States? Well, the good news is… a ...
What is a ‘sustainatarian’? A ‘regenivore’? Are fad diets targeting climate change just a new wave of virtue signaling?
Terms like "climatarian" are getting newfound attention from corporate America as young consumers gravitate toward what they perceive as "green" ...
Viewpoint: Despite ‘incredible amount of pseudoscientific claims,’ consensus confirms safety of GM crops — and they are often safer than organic
A paper, by Elisa Pellegrino et al. published in Nature Scientific Reports, a highly respected peer-reviewed journal, analyzed over 6000 published papers ...
How do we build houses on Mars? Bricks made of bacteria and fungi filaments could help
Rather than hauling construction materials or prefabricated modules aboard a spaceship, astronauts bound for Mars could bring synthetic bacteria cultures ...
Perspectives on cultured meat: Differences driven by ethics, education, ethics and views on how to address climate change
Last week I asked, “What do you think about meat grown in a lab? Would you eat it? Will your ...
Viewpoint: Biotechnology can help address climate change fluctuations and deliver sustainable food and farming, says World Economic Forum
Biotechnology holds part of the key to enabling a transformation of our economy and our food systems ...
‘Like turning on a light-switch’: Gene-edited duckweed poised to revolutionize biofuel by eating up pollution and spitting out oil
Scientists have figured out how to coax copious amounts of oil from duckweed, one of nature’s fastest-growing aquatic plants. Converting ...
Viewpoint: ‘40% of all crops grown are lost to pests and disease’ — That’s we need regulatory reform and automation to promote gene editing
With between 20 and 40% of all crops grown being lost to pests and diseases, the UK agriculture industry could ...
Biomimicry and four other technologies that can limit carbon emissions from food production
Here are five major innovation trends that could help to curb the worst of the climate impact ...
Germany’s organic food market is shrinking. Farmers blame outdated regulations
Some 35,000 farms in Germany are organically run. But they have been hit particularly hard by record inflation as a ...
Addressing climate change’s impact on food and farming: Could CRISPR gene editing become part of the European Green Deal?
Following the adoption of the EU Green Deal, the European Commission has presented a new proposal for plant modification on ...
Challenging the belief that ‘eating soy-based foods can increase the risk of breast cancer’ and 9 other nutrition myths
Some false ideas about nutrition seem to linger in American culture like a terrible song stuck in your head. So ...
Viewpoint: ‘We’re pushing our food systems past their breaking point’ – Why acre for acre, algae is a model sustainable food
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), believe algae could be a new kind of superfood thanks to its high ...
Cuba poised for production of wheat modified by radiation mutagenesis that adapts to extreme heat and climate fluctuations
The history of Cuban science is full of the challenges faced by daring, diligent and, above all, persistent researchers. An ...
German Green ministers split on relaxing rules on gene editing crops to meet sustainability challenges
With the Greens leading both the German agriculture and environment ministries, many expect the country to stand against the Commission’s ...
Viewpoint: Challenging fearmongering — Environmental Working Group’s annual ‘Dirty Dozen’ uses chemophobia to scare people about safe produce
EWG claims that it is not out to scare the public, that it only strives to alert consumers as to ...
Meat made from milk? Dairy-based alternative ‘meats’ may soon be on the menu
Here comes the new field of “dairy-based meat.” Meats made from all natural milk. One of the most nutritious materials ...
Floating Dutch dairy farm produces 200 gallons of milk a day — Here’s how this quirky project offers an answer to rising sea levels and the ‘global land squeeze’
Samuel L Jackson can have his snakes on a plane. Peter and Minke van Wingerden have concocted something even wilder: ...
