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.
Could open source indoor farming help us feed 10 billion people?
Paul Gauthier, a plant physiologist at Princeton University, took a short drive up the New Jersey Turnpike to try to ...
Viewpoint: Non-GMO marketing takes advantage of misinformed consumers
Food marketing claims have always stretched the truth .... But some recent trends are taking dishonest marketing tactics to a ...
China’s decision to import next generation US-grown GMO herbicide-resistant crops will help American farmers struggling to fight hardy weeds
China’s approval of new genetically engineered crops will open a new front in U.S. farmers’ long-running war against hard-to-kill weeds ...
Parasitic wasp brings invasive pest to heel, cuts deforestation 31-95% in southeast Asia
Effective on-farm biological control can slow the pace of deforestation and avert biodiversity loss. This is what an international team ...
Gene editing could boost UK agriculture, but ‘anti-science’ lobby must not control the debate, experts say
Gene editing can bring clear benefits to the UK food and farming industry as UK agricultural moves through its fourth ...
Monsanto retains patent on GMO Bt cotton in India, nation’s Supreme Court rules
Bayer AG’s Monsanto unit won a legal battle to own patents on genetically-modified cotton seeds in India, the world’s biggest producer of ...
Opposition to biotech threatens health of forests, experts say
A coalition of forest scientists, including Steve Strauss of Oregon State University, is calling for an immediate review of international ...
Spicy tomatoes? Scientists want to produce chili pepper metabolites in CRISPR-edited tomatoes
Surely, someone out there has cooked up a shrimp fra diavolo and thought, “mamma mia, this would be much easier ...
McDonald’s eyes lab-grown meat as food, agricultural companies aim to cut environmental impact
The world’s biggest purchaser of beef is watching the plant-based meat market. “Plant-based protein is something we’re keeping an eye ...
Do you really have a food allergy? Only 10 percent of Americans do, study claims
Millions of Americans might be mistaken about their self-professed food allergy, suggests a new survey. It found that while nearly ...
Winter cover crops meant to protect soil may contribute to climate change
Farmers grow crops or leave dying vegetation in their fields over the winter. A new study from the National Center ...
Viewpoint: How Canadian farmers beat anti-GMO Greenpeace at its own game
I confess I don’t read that many books in a year – preferring shorter Internet features instead – but I’m ...
Will fear-based product labels fade in 2019? 5 food and farming predictions for the new year
Welcome, 2019! [In 2018 we] experienced newer diet trends where Keto and Whole30 reigned as some of the most popular ...
Crops engineered to photosynthesize more efficiently boost yields 40%
Plants convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis; however, most crops on the planet are plagued by a photosynthetic glitch, and ...
CRISPR crops poised to revolutionize our diets by increasing fiber, vitamins and ‘good oils’
Many of today’s most prevalent health issues .... trace back to .... the food we eat. The leading cause of death ...
Federal judge restricts evidence to be presented against Monsanto in upcoming glyphosate-cancer trials
Bayer shares rose by more than 6 percent [January 4], a day after a key court ruling in the upcoming ...
USDA releases long-awaited GMO labeling rules
New disclosure requirements finalized by USDA for biotech foods will mandate the use of the term "bioengineered" while providing a key exemption for ...
Viewpoint: If farmers want the public’s trust, they should change how they talk to consumers
The president of Bayer CropScience Canada, Al Driver, had just finished talking about why his company decided to purchase Monsanto ...
India should give its farmers access to more GMO crops, scientist argues
Amid rising concerns over .... Genetically Modified (GM) crops in India, leading biologist Nina Fedoroff has suggested that it [is] ...
Africa could miss the ‘gene revolution’ if it fails to embrace crop biotech, experts say
Africa can’t afford to be left behind as the gene revolution transforms modern farming, African agricultural experts say. This is ...
Nigeria releases GMO cowpea, urges farmers not to reject technology out of fear
After nine years of field trials, the Federal Government has released genetically modified .... cowpeas to farmers in [Nigeria]. Director ...
GMO houseplant traps carcinogenic chemicals that home air filters miss
[M]ost of us like to keep the air in our homes as clean as possible and we often go to ...
Bacon—made of mushrooms? New plant-based meat on the horizon
Eben Bayer, cofounder and CEO of Ecovative, built his company making things out of mycelium, the root structure of a mushroom. He's ...
Can ‘speed breeding’ help Europe develop disease-resistant crops without gene editing?
Technology first used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to grow plants in space is fast-tracking improvements in a ...
M.S. Swaminathan, ‘father of India’s Green Revolution,’ says he’s not opposed to GMO crops
An iconic Indian agricultural scientist is distancing himself from a recent editorial he co-authored that is critical of genetically modified ...
‘Smart farming’: Researchers aim to turn bees into ‘tiny drones’ that monitor plant health
[A] research team at the University of Washington has found a way to make bumblebees act like tiny drones. The ...
While AquaBounty’s GMO salmon remains blocked in US, Argentina exempts the company’s sustainable gene-edited tilapia from regulation
Transgenic salmon producer AquaBounty and its majority owner, Intrexon, [December 18] announced that their jointly developed gene-edited line of tilapia, ...
