Agriculture Archives

Environment

Pesticide Drift and the Politics of Scale in California’s Central Valley

Toxic chemicals are sweeping across our nation's most important agricultural region and officials are using time-tested tactics not to find solutions, but to make the problem seem small and localized.

Lisa Wade

Social Justice

The Downside of Farmers’ Markets

A study of those in the Bronx finds higher prices and fewer varieties of produce than nearby stores.

Tom Jacobs

Environment

Finding Nutrition in the Food Deserts of California

In a state with agricultural export revenue totaling more than $18 billion annually, the Central Valley’s approximately 700,000 farm workers don’t earn enough to feed themselves properly.

Bobbi Murray

Environment

The Tomato Tariff: The Politics of Fruits and Vegetables

An old Supreme Court decision demonstrates how social construction is not just something we do to reality. It is reality.

Lisa Wade

Environment

The Stealth Trade Agreement That Could Super-Size Industrial Agriculture

The “finish line is in sight” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would likely send a generation of forward-thinking agrarian reform straight down the drain.

James McWilliams

Economics

Trekking Through a Food Desert Surrounded by Farmland

Millions have been spent on initiatives to eliminate food deserts, which are thought to contribute to the increasing incidence of diabetes and obesity in low-income areas. How are disadvantaged people faring in the middle of California, one of the nation's prime agricultural states?

Maria Bustillos

Environment

Revenge of the Pigs

How hunting makes the feral hog problem even worse.

James McWilliams

Social Justice

Save the Honeybee, Sterilize the Earth

A decade ago, people started panicking about the collapse of the honeybee population and the crash of our food supply. But today there are more honeybees than there were then. We have engineered our way to a frenzied and precarious new normal.

Josh Dzieza

Economics

What Is the World’s Actual Lowest Hanging Fruit?

A linguist and top pomologists attempt to answer what should be a simple inquiry. Oddly enough, the answer brings a complicated tale of devil strawberries, insurance companies, inferior fruit, and the messy line between literal and metaphorical interpretation.

Ryan Jacobs

Environment

How a New Evolutionary Map Could Help Farmers Eliminate Fertilizer

New research offers hope for prodding corn, wheat, and rice into a partnership with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

John Upton