Farming News

Like many rural families in Central America, Martín García and his sons devoted part of every growing season to slashing and burning a new strip of their land, knowing that…

When farmer Mônica de Souza Ribeiro moved into her landless settlement in the state of Goiás in central Brazil in the late 1990s, she was overwhelmed by the sheer amount…

Europe is one of the largest drivers of tropical deforestation in the world, second only to China. That’s why the European Commission is drafting a plan to break the link…

Industrial agriculture feeds billions of people and created the modern world. But the nitrogen and phosphorus it’s fertilized with is putting the biosphere, and humanity, at risk.

JAKARTA — Intercropping, the practice of growing two or more crops in close proximity, could be one of the keys to mitigating the impact of oil palm plantations on forests…

NAIROBI — Munene Njoka, a young farmer from central Kenya, is furious. The reason for his rage is a bundle of decaying maize stacked in a corner of his home.…

How do you get a small rancher to give up cutting trees for pasture and instead produce high-value and sustainable agricultural products without the requisite skills, money, or access to…

Consider the bee. It’s small, and while over a lifetime it can pollinate up to 5,000 flowers, that’s only enough to produce a single teaspoon of honey. But bees don’t…

Fishing is integral to millions of Indonesians’ livelihoods and identities, with an estimated 2.5 million households involved in small-scale (non-industrial) fishing and aquaculture. Small-scale fishing includes a wide variety of…

Feisal Abdalla spends his days on the sea, taking tourists on whale-watching, snorkeling and diving trips. He and his wife, Amina Sabel, also manage a string of ecotourism cottages along…

MAROS, Indonesia — Santuwo straightens the crease in the sarong that he often wears while working in his rice field in the village of Salenrang, in Indonesia’s South Sulawesi province.…

“Let me turn on my video,” says David Obura halfway through our Zoom call. He holds up his phone so I can see the landscape behind him: rows of green…

About a quarter of the world’s land is degraded. A new farming system intercrops agave and mesquite, then ferments it into cheap fodder, promising restored semiarid croplands and a peasant farming revival.

A profit of over 400%. That’s what BrasilAgro got from one of its early business ventures. The company bought the Cremaq farm in 2006, paying 42 million reais ($8 million)…

New agri-technologies and traditional farming practices done right could combine to offer significant benefits and hope for the global environment and health.

Nearly half of Brazil’s savanna biome has already been lost to agriculture. Scientists say further deforestation may bring biodiversity collapse and disastrous drought, putting Brazil’s water supply and agricultural economy at grave risk.

A new study has identified 2050 as the tipping point by which stakeholders in the Mekong Delta will no longer be able to mitigate the issue of saltwater intrusion, which…

Many of us love animals. At least, we think we do. We may serve our cats gourmet food and let them sleep in our beds. We may buy our dogs…

HIYUNG, Indonesia — For the village cultivating Indonesia’s most pungent chili pepper, July is a time of prosperity — and potential ruin. That midsummer month is when hundreds of farmers…

Behind some of the beef sold in Colombian supermarkets is a story of deforestation in protected areas and illegal armed groups who benefit from cattle ranching. The Colombian Agricultural Institute…

Soybean farming accounts for most of the agrochemicals used in Brazil, and the farming activity concentrated in the state of Mato Grosso is now seeing those chemicals washing downstream to the Pantanal wetlands.

The smart money is on the Amazon forest. Agroforestry can replace cattle, generate new wealth, create jobs and develop new economic zones that insulate pristine forest from deforestation risk.  Investors…

This piece was originally published on Atmos as Paid in Blood on June 7, 2021. It has been republished here with the permission of Atmos. Fernando dos Santos Araújo woke…

To stay within planetary boundary safe limits, we must protect soils by conserving global habitat and revamping industrial agribusiness — and do it fast.

BANGKA, Indonesia — For more than two decades Ardianto has walked to the coastal mangrove trees from his village in Indonesia’s Bangka Island at sunrise with a triangular net, searching…

If the inequities made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic weren’t already grotesque reminders of humanity’s failings, then the assault on our planetary boundaries is downright dangerous. It’s 2021, and four…

More than a decade after the Planetary Boundaries framework was first proposed by top scientists, we are no closer to changing our destructive trajectory — but 2021 gives us three opportunities to act.

African swine fever is seeing a resurgence in Indonesia’s southern East Nusa Tenggara province, government officials say, undermining food security and fueling fears that the viral disease could jump to…

Experts see sustainable small-scale cultivation of endemic fruits, nuts and vegetables by traditional communities as a way to value and save Cerrado ecosystems, while also supporting some of the biome’s best defenders.

Three Guarani men were assaulted last week in Mato Grosso do Sul state allegedly over an ongoing land dispute between ranchers and Indigenous people; one expert accuses the Bolsonaro government of “restriction of the rights of Indigenous peoples.”