Tag • #agriculture

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

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 22 March - 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.

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

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 21 March - 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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‘Farming is a dirty word now’: the woman helping farmers navigate a grim, uncertain future – podcast

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 26 February - 05:00

In a moment of crisis for the industry, Heather Wildman tours the country helping farmers face up to the toughest of questions – not just about the future of their business, but about their family, their identity and even their mortality. By Bella Bathurst

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Macron opens Paris agricultural fair to protests from farmers

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 24 February - 18:47

French president greeted by whistles from hundreds of demonstrators as some clash with police

Hundreds of protesting farmers clashed with police in Paris as Emmanuel Macron toured the annual agricultural fair on Saturday. The French president had opened the fair as angry farmers blew whistles and shouted insults.

Riot police initially kept the protesters at a safe distance as he toured the fair, tasting honey from Normandy and cheeses from the Alps, and shaking hands with exhibitors. But as he entered the fair’s livestock area, hundreds of demonstrators crashed the gates and clashed with police.

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‘Total immersive obsession’: meet the man on a mission to record every bird in Ireland

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 18 February - 13:00

The ornithologist Seán Ronayne’s all-consuming quest has made him an unlikely celebrity in Cork, and his passion for nature is raising awareness about the seriousness of Ireland’s ecological crisis

One of Seán Ronayne’s earliest memories is walking in the countryside near his home with his father. “I cried a lot as a child and I was hyperactive,” he says, “When I was three or four years old, my dad would take me out to calm me down. In the woods, he’d mimic the sound of the birds and ask me what they were. Looking back, I was trained to be an ornithologist almost from the pram. That’s really where it all started.”

As he grew older, Ronayne, who was something of a solitary child, would spend a lot of time at his kitchen window in Cobh, County Cork, peering through binoculars at the birds feeding in his garden and writing down their names in a notebook. At 14, he could identify most of the birds he saw by the sounds they made.