Construction of California's bullet train meant farmers lost land. Some had to pay out of pocket to adjust. The state hasn't been quick to compensate them.

Smarter Every Day 218

The Agriculture Department is barely enforcing regulations on big meat companies.

Behemoth agrochemical companies are failing to deliver what farmers need to grow and what people want to eat.

Beef produces more carbon than any other meat, yet we still can't get enough of the stuff. But can drastic changes in how we farm and eat turn things around?

How is this man growing vegetables in the most northerly major human settlement on Earth.

While 75 percent of US adults believe they usually buy 'humane products', only one percent of farmed animals are raised on non-factory farms

Farmers hope machines can be more precise and efficient than humans

Your introduction to the Mexican tomato crisis.

Egypt's Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation has recently announced its ambitious plan to plant 100 million olive trees by 2022 by offering many land plots to investors. Though Egypt is the world's second-largest exporter of table olives, the government is now fighting tooth and nail to boost the olive oil production, considering that Egypt is a major importer of olive oil.

Store-bought tomatoes taste horrifically disgusting — err, bland. Now scientists have discovered a version of a gene that helps give tomatoes their flavor is actually missing in about 93 percent of modern, domesticated varieties. The discovery may help bring flavor back to tomatoes you can pick up in the produce section.

The No. 1 company on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list for 2019 is Indigo Ag, a start-up that's out to feed the world and help farmers make a good living without harming the planet. The key to its growth is hidden in the stars.

For Maine dairy farmer Fred Stone, the discovery in 2016 that his cows were producing tainted milk has since brought financial ruin and threatened to shut down a century-old family business.

At least 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of U.S. farmland were flooded after the “bomb cyclone” storm left wide swaths of nine major grain producing states under water this month, satellite data analyzed by Gro Intelligence for Reuters showed.

In hindsight, there were plenty of indications over the past decade that American politics were headed toward the partisan sniping and low-stakes media obsessions that crowd the news cycle today. Take Arugulagate. In 2007, Barack Obama was in Iowa, speaking as a presidential hopeful to a group of farmers who were worried about the stagnation of their crop prices while America’s grocery bills continued to rise.

Aquaculture is often promoted as a sustainable alternative to catching wild fish—a way to reduce pressure on overexploited stocks while providing affordable and necessary protein for people’s diets. It’s an argument put forward by major international organizations like the World Bank and the intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But it’s an argument that doesn’t hold up, according to new research.

The short animated cartoon starts out with an animal-rights activist trying to pass out pamphlets in front of a signboard with a pig on it. Despite his enthusiasm, no one stops to learn more about the welfare of animals on factory farms. In the next scene, a cause group puts up a giant billboard with a cute piglet on it and the slogan: “Help thousands of PIGLETS. Donate to our charity TODAY!”

The world wastes more than 1.3 billion tonnes of food each year. The planet’s 1 billion hungry people could be fed on less than a quarter of the food wasted in the US and Europe. In a recent report, the World Economic Forum identified cutting food waste by up to 20 million tonnes as one of 12 measures that could help transform global food systems by 2030. Now South Korea is taking a lead, recycling 95% of its food waste.

Researchers may have found a way to protect Florida strawberries fields from mildew with ultraviolet light. The University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences teamed up with the Norway-based startup, Saga Robotics, to test out the autonomous robot, Thorvald. For several months, one night a week, students test drive the robot and document how the ultraviolet light eliminates mildew from strawberry fields on the Wimauma, Fla. Campus.

In every region, farmers and scientists are trying to adapt an array of crops to warmer temperatures, invasive pests, erratic weather and earlier growing seasons.

Millenia ago, ancient farmers cleared land to plant wheat and maize, potatoes and squash. They flooded fields to grow rice. They began to raise livestock. And unknowingly, they may have been fundamentally altering the climate of the Earth.

An unkempt stretch of tall grass, wildflowers and weeds in front of a train station doesn't look like much — but it may be crucial to solving one of the world's biggest environmental puzzles. While scientists around the globe have been sounding alarm bells over the decline of bees and pollinators crucial to the growth of crops, the diversity of wild bee and honeybee species in the Dutch capital has increased by 45 percent since 2000.

Tiny automated machines could soon take care of the entire growing process. Fewer chemicals, more efficient – where’s the downside?

We’re not managing our crops to support global nutritional needs: In fact, we use a disproportionate amount of land used to grow grains, fats, oils, and sugar, and not enough land to grow the fruits and vegetables that we need to survive, a new research paper asserts.

California voters will soon decide whether to ban the sale of all veal, pork and eggs from farm animals raised in cages, even when raised in other states.

How American whiskey is moving ahead by looking back.

The number of sheep and cattle in the UK should be reduced by between a fifth and a half to help combat climate change, a report says. The shift is needed, the government’s advisory Committee on Climate Change (CCC) maintains, because beef and lamb produce most farm greenhouse gases. The report foresees an increase in the number of pigs and chickens because these produce less methane. The farm union NFU said it did not agree with reducing livestock numbers.

A few years ago I wanted to visit the best egg farm I could find. I had been inside an egg factory farm. I had seen a dozen sheds, each with a dozen rows of wire cages stacked two high and 150ft deep. Those cages were so small the birds inside couldn’t even spread their wings. They were half-starved, diseased, and undeniably miserable. Factory farming was clearly wrong, so I wanted to instead find a farm that represented an ethical and humane way to raise animals for food.

An ant-controlling insecticide used by wine farmers is suspected to have caused the deaths.

This story originally appeared on Reveal and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. William Whitt suffered violent diarrhea for days. But once he began vomiting blood, he knew it was time to rush to the hospital. His body swelled up so much that his wife thought he looked like the Michelin Man, and on the inside, his intestines were inflamed and bleeding.

As President Donald Trump maintains protectionist policies with global trading partners, an increasing number of farms in the Midwest are struggling to stay afloat. At least 84 farm operations in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of northwestern Wisconsin filed for bankruptcy in the 12 months that ended in June, according to a new analysis from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, more than twice the level seen over the same period in 2014.

Researchers from the University of Sydney, CSIRO, the United Kingdom’s John Innes Centre, Limagrain UK and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) have isolated the first major resistance genes against the stripe rust disease that is devastating wheat crops worldwide. The discovery by the scientists, who have cloned three related rust resistance genes – called Yr7, Yr5, and YrSP – will enable these important genes to be accurately monitored and integrated into breeding programs in the fight against ever-changing pathogens that could kill about 70 percent or more of whole wheat crops at a time.

Monsanto’s new herbicide was supposed to save U.S. farmers from financial ruin. Instead, it upended the agriculture industry, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a struggle for survival.

Classical swine fever virus (CSFV) is a highly infectious and deadly disease among pigs, with outbreaks leading to huge livestock losses. Now, researchers from Jilin University in China have genetically modified pigs to be resistant to the virus, which will also pass that down to their offspring.

Our collective overuse and misuse of antibiotics is accelerating resistance to these universal drugs, leaving people increasingly vulnerable to infections that can no longer be treated. This applies not only to the use of antibiotics in human medicine, but also in animal industries. Antibiotic resistance is an example of a collective action problem. These are problems where what is individually rational leads to a collectively undesirable outcome.