Agriculture, Farming, and Food Reading Picks for this Week

Citrouille (pumpkin)

This Tuesday news thread is a weekly feature here at Big Picture Agriculture.

1. Huge ‘dead zone’ demands new approach | DesMoines Register
Comment: Superb! Quote... "to make a real difference, we must change federal policies that provide growers with incentives to plant more corn that leads to more environmental problems."
2. Will rural Iowa wither as big ag becomes bigger, squeezing out farms in the middle? | DesMoines Register
Comment: My 2nd top pick is also from the DesMoines Register. This is a long and excellent article and effort by their paper to help forward the discussion about the rural demographic crisis and the changing role and shape of agriculture in Iowa. It includes great statistics to illustrate trends. Economics, politics of farm bill support, consumer values and technological advancements all play big roles. The paper is participating in several forums with an Iowa sociology professor to discuss the issues that Iowans perceive as important. This is multi-factored, so there is no simple answer.
3. Illinois Issues: The Rural Exodus | Illinois Public Radio
Comment: A similar story out of Illinois, with statistics and observations about the depopulation of small towns and rural areas in Illinois.
4. Struggling town epitomizes rural poverty in Illinois | Illinois Farmer Today
5. ***Trees and shrubs offer new food crops to diversify the farm | Science Daily
Comment: Part of the reason I do these news links each week is to contribute to problem solving by constantly presenting ideas, science, and trends. Great proposals originating at the Univ. of Illinois! I hope it can gain some momentum.
6. America’s Farmers Turn to Bank of John Deere - With banks more tentative, machinery maker raises financing to growers, keeping them as customers but feeding menacing debt | WSJ (paywall)
7. Dicamba-tolerant soybean technology problems and the future | Agriculture.com
8. What should the farm bill really look like and do? | Food Politics
9. Rep. Ann Kuster (D-N.H.) has introduced a bill that aims to help farmers transition to organic agriculture and boost American production of organic products to reduce dependence on imports. | Lexology
10. Food banks, health services find ways to cater to rural areas | Missouri Farmer Today
11. ERs can improve population health in rural areas | Medical Xpress
12. Behind the rise of farm-to-table "agrihood" communities | CBS News
13. Land Use in Agriculture | Our World in Data
14. Farm Economy Softens Further, But Shows Signs of Stabilizing | Federal Reserve Bank of KC
15. 7th District Land Values | Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
16. Back to the land: Russia’s farming transformation - Can government policy and a new foodie class turn the country into an agricultural force? | FT Magazine
Comment: Quality, in depth article, important in the discussion of changing global agriculture powerhouses. Artisanal cheese production is growing rapidly in Russia, as are organics. Their industrial cheese producers are substituting palm oil for milk, however, and the last three paragraphs demonstrate some other obstacles to success.
17. D.I.Y. Artificial Intelligence Comes to a Japanese Family Farm | The New Yorker
18. Organic Farming Promoted in Kerala | The News Minute
19. Tomatoes dominate Dutch greenhouse horticulture | Dutch News
20. Russia to ramp up year-round tomato production with major greenhouse project | Fresh Fruit Portal
21. Italians inaugurate sophisticated residual heat greenhouse | Horti Daily
22. USDA Forecasts Record-High Soybean Production | USAgnet
23. Wheat buckles under weight of Russian mega-crop | Agrimoney
24. Popular Pesticides Keep Bumblebees From Laying Eggs | NPR The Salt
25. The terrible cost of Scotland’s salmon farms | FT
26. Hong Kong cleans up 93 tonnes of palm oil; beaches smothered by spill | Reuters
27. Tanker carrying 8,000 gallons of ethanol overturns in Rowan Co. N.C. | WSOC TV
28. Nebraska Grain bin collapses spilling over one million bushels of corn | Nebraska TV
29. USDA Report on Irrigated Agriculture | USDA
30. Foxconn wants to cultivate ties with Wisconsin ginseng growers | Madison.com
31. USDA Organic: The fight for the label’s integrity - How legal battles behind the label are defining what it takes to be certified | Street Roots News
32. Wheat Farmer Ordered to Pay $2.8 Million | The Land Report
33. Impossible Foods gets heat from environmentalists over safety | San Francisco Chronicle
34. Your Greens Might Soon Be Grown in Warehouses - Technology-driven businesses such as New Jersey-based Bowery are bypassing traditional farming with warehouses and LED fixtures. | National Geographic
35. Soil doesn't forget | CIRES
Quote: “When the cropland is created, they are erasing the words from a story that took millennia to write.”
36. Promise Or Peril? Africa’s 830 Million Young People By 2050 | Huff-Post
37. Federal judge clears way for completion of Missouri River water project in North Dakota | Gazette Times
38. Rural America’s Childbirth Crisis: The Fight to Save Whitney Brown - Women in sparsely populated places are more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than those in large cities—a reversal from 2000 | WSJ (paywall)
39. The Future of Sustainable Food Is the Stuff of Science Fiction | Sustainable Brands
40. In these five countries, people live substantially longer than the worldwide average – and each place has its own secret source of vitality. | BBC
41. The 13 most dangerous foods in the world | Business Insider
42. How Switzerland transformed breakfast | BBC
43. A nutrition scientist predicts a future in which pizza is nutritious as a superfood | Business Insider
44. The $37 billion supplement industry is barely regulated — and it's allowing dangerous products to slip through the cracks | Business Insider
45. Vitamin B3 supplements can prevent miscarriages, birth defects: study | ABC
NOTE: Potentially very important find!!

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