Power, Food and Agriculture

The brutal trade-off that will decide the future of food

A growing number of thinkers say factory farming can help save the planet. Are they right?

INVESTING IN REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE AND FOOD

THE INVESTING IN REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE AND FOOD PODCASTThrough 400+ interviews with farmers, investors, scientists, and entrepreneurs, the podcast puts the spotlight on the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return.

Agriculture research summaries

Read short summaries of agricultural studies tailored to B.C. farmers and producers.

Can We Grow More Food on Less Land? | Hacker News

Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now.

Farming and Rural Affairs - One Nation Victoria

Water for farmers who irrigate, not speculators. Farmland protected from industrial energy projects, local timber backed, Labor's fisheries job cuts reversed.

Crop–livestock integration beyond the farm level: a review

AbstractParadoxically, the number of crop–livestock farms is declining across Europe, despite the fact that crop-livestock farms are theoretically optimal to improve the sustainability of agriculture. To solve this issue, crop–livestock integration may be organized beyond the farm level. For instance, local groups of farmers can negotiate land-use allocation patterns and exchange materials such as manure, grain, and straw. Development of such a collective agricultural system raises questions, rarely documented in the literature, about how to integrate crops and livestock among farms, and the consequences, impacts, and conditions of integrating them. Here, we review the different forms of crop–livestock integration beyond the farm level, their potential benefits, and the features of decision support systems (DSS) needed for the integration process. We identify three forms of crop–livestock integration beyond the farm level: local coexistence, complementarity, and synergy, each with increasingly stronger temporal, spatial, and organizational coordination among farms. We claim that the forms of integration implemented define the nature, area, and spatial configuration of crops, grasslands, and animals in farms and landscapes. In turn, these configurations influence the provision of ecosystem services. For instance, we show that the synergy form of integration promotes soil fertility, erosion control, and field-level biological regulation services through organizational coordination among farmers and spatiotemporal integration between crops, grasslands, and animals. We found that social benefits of the synergy form of integration include collective empowerment of farmers. We claim that design of the complementarity and synergy forms of crop–livestock integration can best be supported by collective participatory workshops involving farmers, agricultural consultants, and researchers. In these workshops, spatialized simulation modeling of crop–livestock integration among farms is the basis for achieving the upscaling process involved in integrating beyond the farm level. Facilitators of these workshops have to pay attention to the consequences on governance and equity issues within farmers groups.

Driving Finance for Sustainable Food Systems: A Roadmap to Implementation for Financial Institutions and Policy Makers

Food systems play a central role in all societies and are fundamental to sustainable development. The environmental and social impacts of the global food system are interconnected and affect diverse...

Faire bloc : la contre-mobilisation agricole face à la critique environnementale dans l’espace public numérique

Au cours des dernières années, l’agriculture est devenue un point de plus en plus « chaud » dans les controverses environnementales. Avec une visibilité nouvelle dans les médias traditionnels comme sur les réseaux sociaux, nombre de militants et organisations dénoncent les effets destructeurs de l’intensification des modes de production agricole sur la santé humaine, les conditions de vie des animaux d’élevage, la biodiversité et le climat. Dans cet article, nous étudions le déploiement, dans l’espace public numérique, d’une forme de contre-mobilisation en réponse à ces dénonciations. Cette contre-mobilisation repose sur l’activation de solidarités entre agriculteurs et professionnels para-agricoles, mus par une expérience partagée de la critique et le projet commun d’y répliquer. L’analyse de la transformation des mécanismes de représentation des mondes agricoles permet ainsi de relativiser l’opposition classique entre l’action stratégique et discrète de lobbying, coordonnée et orchestrée par les acteurs économiques dominants, et l’action décentralisée et spontanée des mouvements sociaux en ligne, qui évoluent de façon fluide, sans structure ni dirigeant.

Collections: Bread, How Did they Make it? Part III: Actually Farming

Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As the third part (I, II, III, IV, A) of our look at the basic structure of food production …

The Post-Productive Economy

[Translations: Japanese] Take a look at these farm houses which I saw under construction in remote areas of Yunnan province China. They were not unusual; farmsteads this size were everywhere in rural China. Note the scale of these massive buildings. Each … Continue reading →

Labor-Value Commodity Chains: The Hidden Abode of Global Production - Monthly Review

Intan Suwandi is a frequent contributor to Monthly Review. This article is adapted from her book, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism, winner of the 2018 Paul M. Sweezy-Paul A.... READ MORE

How does food get traded around the world?

Our interactive tool helps you see where food is exported from and where it goes.

Plant-based meat has been relentlessly — and unfairly — attacked as “ultra-processed.” Can the industry save itself?

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are placing big, divergent bets on the future of meat. Who will win?

Data Governance for Sustainable Digital Food Systems | DigiFood

Explore our research on agricultural data governance in Kenya, India, and Colombia. We aim to support civil society with a human-rights based approach to digital food systems. Join us in promoting equitable practices for sustainable agriculture.

A social-ecological framework for analyzing and designing integrated crop–livestock systems from farm to territory levels

Integrated crop–livestock systems are often considered a promising way to address agricultural sustainability issues. Many authors claim that complementarities and synergies between crops and livestock can improve nutrient cycling and delivery of ecosystem services (ES) in agricultural systems. They have analyzed effects of interactions at the farm level and affirmed the potential advantage of developing crop–livestock interactions at the territory level. However, potential benefits of developing synergies beyond the farm level have not been clearly identified. Thus, we developed a conceptual framework that can be used to analyze, design and perform integrated assessment of crop–livestock systems at the territory level. To address crop–livestock interaction issues, we define it as a social-ecological system called the territorial crop–livestock system (TCLS). The ecological system is represented as three interacting components, crops, grasslands and animals, allowing description of various land uses and their potential effects on nutrient cycling and ES. The social system, represented as farmers interacting with natural-resource managers and agro-food chain actors, determines land use and the nature and intensity of ES delivered. We highlight the importance of coordination and learning among actors to support implementation of complex adaptive systems such as TCLSs. We illustrate the expressive power of our conceptual framework through development of a generic typology of crop–livestock systems. Then we show how our conceptual framework can be used as an intermediary object with stakeholders in participatory design approaches. We illustrate this process by representing four archetypal TCLSs. We provide an example of the design approach implemented in Southwestern France to address severe recurrent water shortages, which includes analysis of land use in the current crop–livestock system and the associated key metabolic and ES issues, identification of options for change and multi-criteria analysis of these options. We conclude that this framework shows great potential to support development of sustainable farming systems at the territory level.

Some recent developments in controlled-environment agriculture: on plant physiology, sustainability, and autonomous control

In this review, we highlight some recent developments in controlled-environment agriculture (CEA), discuss its sustainability and provide a future outlook, mainly based on recently published work f...