Farm Issues

With more than half of all U.S. farmworkers being undocumented immigrants, a new report suggests over 1,000 farms in New York could close or significantly reduce operations if deportations continue.

With Monsanto Co's (MON.N) latest flagship weed killer, dicamba, banned in Arkansas and under review by U.S. regulators over concerns it can drift in the wind, farmers and weed scientists are also complaining that confusing directions on the label make the product hard to use safely.

If only I had a dollar for the number of times I had people tell me, “Gabe, you just don’t understand that our soils are not like yours.” I have learned to listen patiently (OK, sometimes not so patiently) as these people tell me all the reasons my soils are productive, and theirs are not.

How is it that these lands were once healthy, functioning ecosystems? What changed between then and now? Could it be that we are the reason our land is no longer as productive as it once was? Could it be we are the reason that our soils do not function properly?

As with any kind of budget, spending that exceeds your resources eventually means finding ways to cut back. The Paris Climate Agreement, written in 2015, was like the first draft of a household budget: an outline of how quickly we are spending, how little we are saving, and how soon our rampant use of resources is expected to have disastrous consequences. While these talks in Paris focused almost exclusively on the energy sector, the elephant in the budget was agriculture, the second largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.