Latest Agriculture News
Jamaica's female farmers rebuild after Hurricane Beryl through women-led cash voucher program
CROSS KEYS, Jamaica (AP) — Alance Wisdom got inside her home just in time to watch the ceiling of her front room collapse. As the rain rushed in, a violent wind ripped at the roof, piece by piece. “Everything just fell,” Wisdom, 79, said of the day Hurricane Beryl, the...
Judge in Brazil orders slaughterhouses to pay for Amazon reforestation
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — A judge in the Brazilian state of Rondonia has found two beef slaughterhouses guilty of buying cattle from a protected area of former rainforest in the Amazon and ordered them, along with three cattle ranchers, to pay a total of $764,000 for causing environmental damage,...
Drought forces Kenya's Maasai and other cattle herders to consider fish and camels
KAJIADO, Kenya (AP) — The blood, milk and meat of cattle have long been staple foods for Maasai pastoralists in Kenya, perhaps the country's most recognizable community. But climate change is forcing the Maasai to contemplate a very different dish: fish. A recent yearslong drought...
EU officials pledge to develop more water-saving technologies in farming as droughts worsen
AYIA NAPA, Cyprus (AP) — Officials from nine southern European Union countries pledged Tuesday to work together to develop more water-saving technologies in agriculture as the prospect of worsening droughts puts additional strain on farmers and threatens food security. The promises...
Companies are crafting new ways to grow cocoa, and chocolate alternatives, to keep up with demand
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Climate change is stressing rainforests where the highly sensitive cocoa bean grows, but chocolate lovers need not despair, say companies that are researching other ways to grow cocoa or develop cocoa substitutes. Scientists and entrepreneurs are...
Sweaty corn is making it even more humid
Barb Boustead remembers learning about corn sweat when she moved to Nebraska about 20 years ago to work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and found herself plunked down in an ocean of corn. The term for the late-summer spike in humidity from corn plants cooling themselves was...
Drying lakes and thirsty trees: In drought-hit Greece, water trucks are keeping crops alive
NEA SILATA, Greece (AP) — Six weeks before harvest, there’s no water left in the ground for farmer Dimitris Papadakis’ olive grove in northern Greece, so he has started a new morning routine. Joined by his teenage son, he uses a truck to bring water from nearby areas. Using a...
Book Review: Technology and chaotic government programs doom family farms in 'Land Rich Cash Poor'
Brian Reisinger's “Land Rich Cash Poor” emerges as an anthem to the family farm in America, romanticized despite the never-ending work even in good times, which have been sparse in the last century. The book follows a procession of efforts by other authors laboring to explain...
Game of inches: Lobster fishermen say tiny change in legal sizes could disrupt imperiled industry
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Gerry Cushman has seen Maine's iconic lobster industry survive numerous threats in his three decades on the water, but the latest challenge — which might sound tiny — could be the biggest one yet. Lobster fishing is a game of inches, and the number of...
More than 2,300 pounds of meth is found hidden in celery at Georgia farmers market
FOREST PARK, Ga. (AP) — Celery was used to conceal more than 2,300 pounds (1,043 kilograms) of methamphetamines that federal agents discovered in a truck at a farmers market outside Atlanta, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said. In what the DEA called one of the largest...
