Daily Food & Agriculture Digest
Every day, the staff of the Genes and Science scours the Web for stories on a range of agricultural and food issues, including the GMO debate, conventional and organic farming, regulations, new breeding technologies and sustainability. We publish excerpts of those stories and encourage our readers to visit the original publications for the complete stories.
Viewpoint: Animal agriculture is growing more sustainable, so don’t blame it for climate change
Simply put, U.S. cattle aren’t the major driver of climate change. So Americans can feel good about whatever kind of ...
Did Monsanto wrongly sue this farmer for accidentally growing patented GMO canola?
Often, the first thing I hear is “isn’t that the case where someone got sued because seed blew onto his ...
Tinted solar panels could boost farm incomes
Tinted, semi-transparent solar panels can generate electricity and simultaneously produce nutritionally-superior crops, offering farmers the prospect of higher incomes and ...
How the anti-GMO movement has merged with COVID conspiracists
The Organic Consumers Association, which promotes the organic industry and is a top funder of the anti-GMO conspiracy website U.S. Right to ...
Swapping red meat for plant-based beef may cut cardiovascular disease risk
Swapping out red meat for certain plant-based meat alternatives can improve some cardiovascular risk factors, according to a new study ...
Florida sees increase in dengue fever cases while regulators mull GMO gene drive mosquito release
Antibody testing in the Key Largo area has identified another 11 cases of dengue fever, bringing the total this year ...
Kenyan farmers could plant GMO insect-resistant Bt cotton by November, boosting $500 million textile industry
Industrialization, Trade and Enterprise Development Cabinet Secretary Ms. Betty Maina said farmers should expect to plant Bt cotton by November ...
Organic food healthier? Nutritionist explains what the media get wrong time and again
For years, the organic versus conventional argument has fueled twitter wars, marketing schemes, and a hell of a lot of ...
France poised to lift neonicotinoid insecticide ban to save pest-ravaged sugar beet industry
The French government is planning to lift a blanket ban on the use of neonicotinoids to help save its sugar ...
Viewpoint: ‘Onerous’ regulations exacerbate consumer fear of gene-edited crops
....[T]he use of genetic engineering and gene editing to develop new crop varieties is well understood by the scientific community ...
Rwanda controls COVID-19 but its farmers struggle
Rwanda has achieved astonishing results in controlling the novel coronavirus, recording just five deaths from COVID-19 even as cases continue ...
Viewpoint: GMO mosquitoes illustrate how and why science should confront ‘nature’s mindless dangers’
Wisconsin’s ubiquitous mosquitoes, it turns out, aren’t taking social distancing to heart at all. Sitting on the deck, browsing the ...
Do fast food takeout wrappers and containers harbor harmful chemicals?
The containers that hold your takeout dinner may harbor an invisible threat: fluorinated compounds that persist in our bodies long ...
Viewpoint: Cuba needs GMOs to help combat poverty fueled by decades of communism
Cuba may be blessed with rich soil, but Communism has condemned its farmers to abject poverty. They lack the tools ...
Why grow GMOs? Because plants don’t naturally evolve into food fit for humans
Crop improvement has a history as old as human civilization. At its core is a strategy to pursue greater genetic ...
Viewpoint: Turning farms into carbon repositories can’t stave off ‘climate catastrophe’
In late June, overlooked amid pandemic, economic crisis, and protest headlines, a bipartisan cohort of United States senators introduced a ...
Next Green Revolution: Gene-silencing technology opens door to safer pesticides, more GMO crops
In the 1940s, modern chemistry delivered new classes of man-made chemical pesticides that still are widely used today. These synthetic ...
Another pandemic coming? Expanding land use boosts exposure to diverse zoonotic diseases, study finds
Land use change—for example, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural or urban ecosystems—is widely recognized to influence the risk ...
GM crops can lift farmers out of poverty, study shows
On a continent where more than 80 percent of the people living in extreme poverty are rural farmers, some have ...
7 years after the first lab-grown burger, is ‘cultivated meat’ any closer to commercialization?
Almost everything we consider a great invention is, in fact, a series of great inventions. Take the electric car, which ...
Organic farming fraud is growing, prompting USDA crackdown proposal
Responding to increasing fraud threats to the organic industry, the US Department of Agriculture seeks to strengthen oversight and improve ...
Viewpoint: Pseudo-science alert—Zac Efron’s ‘Down to Earth’ Netflix series spreads anti-GMOs myths
Zac Efron doesn’t say much except “Dude” and “Wow” in his Netflix docu-series Down to Earth. It’s a mostly innocuous show. If you’re ...
With the global population growing, should we worry about future food shortages?
There's a common warning about our planet's future: the risk of food shortages. "We've got a growing world and a ...
Viewpoint: GMO crops are safe and nutritious. India needs them to feed itself
The need to increase agricultural productivity without increasing the area under cultivation to support our increasing demand for quality food ...
‘On-off’ immune switch in plants could lead to more disease-resistant crops
Keini Dressano, Alisa Huffaker and their colleagues at the University of California San Diego's Division of Biological Sciences have discovered ...
Just 7 years old, CRISPR gene editing is making food more nutritious and battling COVID
Just seven years ago, the Broad Institute’s Feng Zhang, PhD, and Harvard geneticist George Church, PhD, separately demonstrated that in ...
French winegrowers challenge proposed ‘unfair, unenforceable’ glyphosate weedkiller restrictions
Distributors and winegrowers are standing up against the changes to the ban on glyphosate proposed by ANSES. They find them ...
Democratic lawmakers propose ban on organophosphate and neonicotinoid insecticides
Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) are introducing companion legislation to cancel the registrations of organophosphates and ...
