How Sustainable is SUSTAIN?

It was a corporate initiative supporters claimed could mainstream sustainable agriculture. Now critics are wondering how much impact it’s really having. When Land O’ Lakes, the dairy giant, announced SUSTAIN, an ambitious program designed to reduce nitrogen-based...

How Fires in the Amazon Will Affect Farmers in the Midwest

It’s an adage among ecologists: everything living is connected. What happens to one biological population has what economists might call a multiplier effect, cascading down a chain of causes and effects to shape the lives of other biological populations in far-flung...

Farming off the Grid

Everyone knows farms draw a lot of energy to run. While power costs usually comprise only 2% of farms’ overhead, that’s still $10,000+ annually in costs. There’s significant variation depending on what commodities the land produces. If you raise cattle, that median...

5 Ways to Fix Mass Food Production

Though it’s bigger than ever, the industrial food complex is under heavy criticism these days. Environmentalists fault it for chemical runoff, biodiversity loss, and depletion of water and soil. Animal rights activists decry squalid conditions inside factory farms....