pesticides
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3 New Studies Link Bee Decline To Bayer Pesticide
It's springtime, and farmers throughout the Midwest and South are preparing to plant corn—and lots of it. The USDA projects this year's corn crop will cover 94 million acres, the most in 68 years. [...] Nearly all of that immense stand of corn will be planted with seeds treated with neonicotinoid pesticides produced by the German chemical giant Bayer. Read More »
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Agriculture At A Crossroads: How Food Systems Affect Biodiversity
On today’s United Nations biodiversity day, we are being asked to focus on small islands and their unique ecology and fragility in times of globally pervasive threats such as climate change. Read More »
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Atrazine: Syngenta's Herbicide Doesn't Just Poison Frogs - It Could Give You Cancer
Tyrone Hayes has fought a 15-year battle with Syngenta following his discovery that its herbicide Atrazine scrambles sex in frogs, writes F William Engdahl. Now he wants to know - is Atrazine the cause of the US's 2-fold reproductive cancer excess among Blacks and Hispanics?...
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Beepocalypse Redux: Honeybees Are Still Dying — And We Still Don’t Know Why
More than five years after it was first reported, colony-collapse disorder is still killing honeybees around the world. If scientists can't pinpoint the cause, the economic and environmental damage could be immense Read More »
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Cancer Deaths Double In Argentina's GMO Agribusiness Areas
Sharply increased levels of crop spraying in Argentina's most intensively farmed areas have resulted in a public health disaster, writes Lawrence Woodward, with large increases in cancer incidence. And it's all the result of the widespread use of GMO crops engineered for herbicide resistance...
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Controversial Pesticides Killing Wild Birds As Well As Bees
Controversial pesticides blamed for the loss of bee colonies may also be having much wider environmental effects and damaging wild bird populations, research has shown.
Scientists in the Netherlands linked declines in farmland bird species, such as starlings and tree sparrows, with a neonicotinoid chemical used to protect crops from insect pests...
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Decline Of Monarch Butterflies Linked To Modern Agriculture
The massive migration of monarch butterflies is amazing—the insects go from grazing on milkweed plants as caterpillars in the midwest to spending winters in Mexico. But Monarch populations have been on the decline for some time, with a variety of factors being considered: lost habitat in Mexico, damage from pesticides, or climate change. Read More »
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Did Scientists Just Solve The Bee Collapse Mystery?
It's a hard-knock life, scouring the landscape for pollen to sustain a beehive. Alight upon the wrong field, and you might encounter fungicides, increasingly used on corn and soybean crops, and shown to harm honeybees at tiny levels. [...] Read More »
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EWG Releases 2014 Pesticides In Produce ‘Dirty Dozen’ And ‘Clean Fifteen’: Apples Worst Offender, Once Again
The Environmental Working Group has released its 2014 editions of the ‘Dirty Dozen’ and ‘Clean Fifteen’ guides to pesticides on produce. Read More »
Follow The Honey: 7 Ways Pesticide Companies Are Spinning The Bee Crisis
If you like to eat, then you should care about what’s happening to bees. Two-thirds of our food crops require pollination–the very foods that we rely on for healthy eating–such as apples, berries, and almonds, just to name a few. That’s why the serious decline in bee populations is getting more attention, with entire campaigns devoted to saving them. Read More »
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Healthy Soil Is the Real Key to Feeding the World
One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals. When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, “Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,” the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils.
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How America’s Dairyland Is Polluted By Factory Farms
The slogan on Wisconsin’s license plate—“America’s Dairyland”—celebrates the state’s number one agricultural activity and iconic status as a milk and cheese producer. What it doesn’t reveal is how dramatically the dairy industry in Wisconsin and in other parts of the U.S. has been changing, or the environmental concerns those changes pose. Read More »
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Millions March Against Monsanto Calling For Boycott Of GMOs
On May 24, millions of people from around the world participated in the March Against Monsanto, calling for the permanent boycott of genetically engineered foods and other harmful agro-chemicals. Marches occurred on six continents, in 52 countries, with events in more than 400 cities, including 47 U.S. states. Read More »
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Protecting Native Pollinators: Understanding Their Important Roles In Your Garden
Native pollinators are extremely important members of any ecosystem, and should be cared for and stewarded especially by those of us who grow gardens. [...] These creatures work hard to provide us with the food we eat, support biological diversity and protect wildlife survival. Use our short guide on pollinators to learn how to create landscape friendly to the native pollinators in your yard that will help sustain the health of our natural world. Read More »
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Scientists Discover What’s Killing The Bees And It’s Worse Than You Thought
As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought. Read More »
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