Category: Agriculture

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Pharming Bad Bacteria

In December 2003, a farm couple in the Netherlands scheduled their six-month-old daughter for surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. But before Eveline van den Heuvel could be admitted to the hospital, a test showed that she was carrying a strain of Staphylococcus aureus

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The Man Who Turned Antibiotics Into Animal Feed

The food industry and the medical community have fought bitterly, and for decades, over the widespread practice of adding antibiotics to livestock feed to make animals grow faster. Banning the practice would be an agricultural disaster, food companies predict—or at least the end of affordable

China’s Rising Consumer Class Sparks Climate Change Fears

TUOJIA VILLAGE, China – When you think about China’s growing greenhouse gas emissions, you probably don’t think of people like Zhang Chao or his father Zhang Dejun. Zhang Chao, a 35-year-old middle school teacher living in small city in southwestern

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Tropic of Illusions

Takashi Shida bent down in a field of soy beans, briefly disappearing in the sea of pea green stalks that swelled off toward the flat horizon. Surfacing again, he brandished a plant better than a yard long. He grasped it firmly and, as if playing

A Punjabi farmer, using a hand tool to create a channel for his irrigation water, takes a break on a foggy morning. Photo by APF Fellow Russell Clemings

“The Gift of the Indus”

If any one place deserves to be called the birthplace of modern irrigation, that place is the Punjab, a sandy triangle of pancake-flat alluvium where India’s British rulers built the first of their 46 “canal colonies” in 1849. The first colony consisted of only a