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      Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 15:13

    A process called biofortification puts nutrients directly into seeds and could reduce global hunger, but it’s not a magic bullet

    In 2004, Donald Davis and fellow scientists at the University of Texas made an alarming discovery: 43 foods, mostly vegetables, showed a marked decrease in nutrients between the mid and late 20th century.

    According to that research , the calcium in green beans dropped from 65 to 37mg. Vitamin A levels plummeted by almost half in asparagus. Broccoli stalks had less iron.

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      An Australian farmer has held the first carbon-neutral cattle sale – here’s how it works

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 6 days ago - 23:00

    Seven hundred breeding cows and heifers reared in a ‘carbon neutral farming system’ sold in NSW on Thursday. But can a live cow be carbon neutral?

    Australia’s first carbon-neutral cattle sale took place this week.

    Seven hundred Angus breeding cows and heifers, reared through a “carbon-neutral farming system”, went under the hammer at the saleyards in Gloucester, a small town three hours’ drive from Sydney , on Thursday.

    Sign up to receive Guardian Australia’s fortnightly Rural Network email newsletter

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      Bats are in trouble. That’s not good for anyone who likes mezcal, rice or avocado

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 7 days ago - 09:00

    Some of our favorite foods and drinks rely on these oft-misunderstood mammals, which are facing multiple threats

    If you’ve ever enjoyed coffee, tomatoes, corn, bananas, mangoes, walnuts, chocolate, tequila or mezcal, you may just owe bats a thank-you.

    While bats are often the subject of fear and scorn – they’re fixtures in Halloween decor and haunted-house imagery, and are frequently portrayed as harbingers of doom – their presence is often a sign of a thriving ecosystem. Some of our favorite food and drinks would be much less plentiful, or even nonexistent, without them.

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      Banks driving increase in global meat and dairy production, report finds

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 18 March - 06:00


    Financiers providing billion-dollar support for industrial livestock companies to expand leading to unsustainable rise in production

    Billion-dollar financing is driving unsustainable increases in global meat and dairy production, a report has found.

    Global meat production rose 9% between 2015 and 2021, the report said, while dairy production increased 13% in that time.

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      Bouygues attaque en justice des basques voulant préserver 3,7 ha de « terres agricoles rarissimes »

      alt.movim.eu / LaReleveEtLaPeste · Wednesday, 13 March - 14:54

    « Ce que je vois surtout aujourd’hui, c’est qu’on cherche à criminaliser notre action et que c’est un signal fort que vous (les juges, ndlr) allez envoyer à la population et à la jeunesse qui ne veulent plus de ces pratiques immorales qui les privent de leur façon d’habiter le territoire au présent, et de leur futur ! »

    Cet article Bouygues attaque en justice des basques voulant préserver 3,7 ha de « terres agricoles rarissimes » est apparu en premier sur La Relève et La Peste .

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      Some states are now trying to ban lab-grown meat

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 12 March - 13:30

    tanks for growing cell-cultivated chicken

    Enlarge / Cell-cultivated chicken is made in the pictured tanks at the Eat Just office on July 27, 2023 in Alameda, Calif. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

    Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees—those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers, and meatpackers in each state.

    State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a “war on our ranching” and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits.

    Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane—a potent greenhouse gas that’s roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions.

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      What makes an orange? New study finds one gene, seven chemicals

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 7 March - 18:42 · 1 minute

    image of slices of various citrus fruit, showing range of colors and sizes.

    Enlarge (credit: Tanja Ivanova )

    In the US, for orange juice to be labeled as such, it must be 90 percent sweet orange, or Citrus sinensis . Thus, citrus producers in the US have long planted 90 percent Citrus sinensis. But this cultivar is extremely susceptible to the bacteria that causes citrus greening disease, which has devastated the near-monocultural Florida crop. There is as yet no way to control the disease; the most effective way to deal with it would be to find citrus cultivars that are resistant to it and breed them with sweet orange to grant them disease resistance.

    Sweet oranges are a hybrid of mandarin and pomelo and are not especially genetically diverse. Any disease-resistant citrus we know of, however, does not taste like sweet orange, so breeding with it will produce fruit and juice with off flavors. It has been difficult to define and quantify those off flavors, though, because it has been difficult to define and quantify the components essential for proper orange flavor.

    Now, researchers at the USDA Agricultural Research Service performed a comprehensive chemical evaluation of 179 different citrus combinations—oranges, mandarins, and assorted hybrids—and cross-referenced their chemical compositions with evaluations of orange and mandarin flavors in juice samples performed by a “trained panel.”

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      We need to talk about water – and the fact that the world is running out of it | George Monbiot

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 4 March - 06:00

    On a planet getting hotter and drier by the year, governments are wilfully ignoring a looming crisis

    There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change.

    Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water.

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      Out with the animal cruelty. In with … mushrooms? These farmers are leaving factory farming behind

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 3 March - 16:00

    Some farmers have turned from livestock to crops to avoid the financial pitfalls and thorny ethics of industrial agriculture

    Farmer Tom Lim had been raising poultry for 20 years when the company he worked for as a contractor terminated him without warning, leaving him saddled with debt and unsure of where to turn. “My heart just dropped,” he said. “I didn’t know where to make money to pay off our loans.”

    Lim was born in rural Cambodia, where his parents tended rice fields with water buffalos, raised a smattering of chickens and grew vegetables around their home. That lifestyle shaped his love of farming, but was a far cry from what he found himself doing as an adult, raising 540,000 chickens a year in North Carolina for Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the largest meat producers in the US that supplies chicken to Walmart, Costco and KFC.

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