farming
We’ve crossed the land use change planetary boundary, but solutions await
Just weeks after visiting a patch of Malaysian rainforest, Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler learned it had been logged for wood chips to supply a paper plant. A teenager at the time, Butler recalls being devastated. “This place of wonder and beauty was lost forever,” he wrote in a 2018 story. “The orangutan, the hornbills, […]
Shade-grown coffee won’t support all birds, but adding a forest helps: Study
Organic, shade-grown, bird-friendly: coffee comes with a lot of labels these days, certifications that tell the consumer their beans were farmed in a way that supports the people who grow them and the ecosystems that sustain them. And with coffee now growing on more than 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) of agricultural land in some […]
Community-based seed banks in Nepal help conserve native species
MARAMCHE, NEPAL— The monsoon clouds that arrive in Nepal in the first week of June herald the start of the rice-planting season. The country’s hills, valleys and plains turn green as farmers take to their muddy fields to start sowing the crop that will feed them for the whole year. As most farmers turn to […]
Winter sanctuary in Nepal proves a killing field for yellow-breasted buntings
KATHMANDU — Ornithologist Hem Bahadur Katwal, who studies farmland birds, says he’s excited about an upcoming trip to visit Nepal’s plains when the monsoon rains end in September. This is the time when the cold starts creeping in over the lands farther north — Russia, Mongolia, China — and thousands of migratory birds flock to […]
Study: Regenerative farming boosts soil health, yielding more nutritious crops
Plants build themselves from sunlight, water, and soil. And, as it turns out, what crops “eat” can influence the nutrients on our own plates. A recent study, published in the journal PeerJ, compared the nutritional content of food crops grown using conventional versus regenerative farming practices — those that build the soil by using cover […]
Video: Indonesian villagers missing out on spoils from palm oil boom
One day in 2017, as a truck loaded with oil palm fruit drove down the main road in his village on the island of Borneo, Rita Dihales decided he’d had enough. He intercepted the truck, insisting that the company whose fruit it carried had failed to share the spoils of its plantation with the local […]
Farmers in Brazil’s Cerrado cotton on to the benefits of agroecology
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 46 cotton-farming families in Brazil’s Minas Gerais began practicing agroecology, a sustainable farming approach that works with nature.
As its topsoil washes away, the Corn Belt is losing yields — and carbon
Chances are, if you live in North America, you’ve eaten corn from the Corn Belt, a region in the United States Midwest that produces 75% of U.S. corn. Scientists have found that around 35% of the region has lost its most fertile A-horizon soil, more commonly known as topsoil, since European colonization in the 1800s, […]
The complete guide to restoring your soil: Q&A with soil expert Dale Strickler
Son of a sharecropper and lifetime farmer, Dale Strickler has lived his life by the soil. Strickler grew up in an impoverished area near the Ozarks in the U.S. Midwest, where he says he watched as the crops on his family farm died from drought and as the topsoil washed away from tilled fields. “If […]
Inga tree points to way out of slash-and-burn for Central American farmers
Like many rural families in Central America, Martín García and his sons devoted part of every growing season to slashing and burning a new strip of their land, knowing that it was the only way to make it fertile enough to yield food for everyone. They couldn’t grow on the land they had used in […]