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| "Kansas Cornfield" by John Steuart Curry 1933 |
This Tuesday news thread is a weekly feature here at Big Picture Agriculture.
- Amazon-Whole Foods deal could mean new phase of retail | USAToday
- German deep discounters go big in America | The Economist (paywall) Comment: Though the Amazon-Whole Paycheck story grabbed the most headlines, this is also an important grocery story this week.
- The crop that ate America (corn) | Bloomberg
- Corn: The crop that ate America | Food Politics (The next articles are directly related to the above 2.)
- US corn ethanol producers to tap into overseas demand | FT
- The Mexican Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) announced recently a change that will increase the maximum amount of ethanol that can be blended in Mexican gas supplies from 5.8 percent to 10 percent. | EthanolRFA
- Higher ethanol blends key to driving farm economy | Ethanol Producer Mag Lobbyist article. Quote: "The evidence is mounting that a blend of 30 percent ethanol might be the true sweet spot"
- Oslo airport is using renewable jet fuel made from waste cooking oil as part of its fuel mix, but the fact this fuel is being imported from California has led to question marks about its real environmental credentials | Biofuels News
- As Big, High-Tech Farms Take Hold, How Do Nearby Towns Stay Afloat? | KUNC Quote: "farmers are on a 'technology treadmill,' a term the late agricultural economist Willard Cochrane coined. As more farmers adopt new technology, they become more efficient, drive down prices on the crops they produce, and 'that means the people who have not adopted find themselves with high costs and find it very difficult to make any money, and many of them wind up deciding to get out of the business.'"
- New Ruralism: Solutions for Struggling Small Towns | The Dirt
- Costco's Nebraska Chicken Farmers are being recruited now. | Harvest Public Media Comment: Just take out a 2 million dollar loan, and you're in!
- Global diet and farming methods ‘must change for environment’s sake’ | Environmental Research Web Quote: "future improvements in agricultural sustainability are likely to be driven by dietary shifts and increases in efficiency, rather than changes between food production systems."
- On June 13, The Washington Post brought entrepreneurs, food industry executives, scientists and farmers together to discuss how technology and science are changing our modern food systems. This is a transcript. | Wash-Post
- How the World’s Farmers Went to Work for China | Bloomberg
- Enlist corn approved by China | AGweb
- Beef from U.S. resumes sales to China after 14 year hiatus | KUNC
- Rural America Is Stranded in the Dial-Up Age | WSJ
- Three trends reshaping agriculture | Tech Accel Quote: A year and a half ago, A. Gary Shilling summed up the downturn in the commodities market with this chilling observation in BloombergView: “The price of everything that is grown or pulled out of the ground—from oil and gas to sugar and copper—has declined 46 percent since early 2011, causing bankruptcies and industry consolidation.”
- It’s not often that more than a dozen square miles of Illinois farmland come to market at one time, but that’s exactly what happened last December. | The Land Report
- With 4,000 animals arriving on 60 flights, a Doha businessman is creating a local Qatar dairy industry. | Bloomberg
- The Relationship Between Energy Prices and Food-Related Energy Use in the United States | Amber Waves
- Sophisticated Farmers Cut Out Trading Giants in Profit Hunt | Bloomberg
- Wal-Mart plans to market a Bayer-designed better tasting Cantaloupe | Bloomberg
- The Future of Farming May Not Involve Dirt or Sun; New Jersey-based AeroFarms proposes a radical and more sustainable way to grow the world's food. | Inc.com
- A Google-backed warehouse farm just raised $20 million to build in cities across the US | Business Insider
- Organic marketplace at risk: US production increases needed to combat import fraud | Global Miller
- Northwest hop acreage increases by 6 percent | Capital Press
- Fear of losing blueberry growers as prices drop, crop soars | AP
- Growth in India’s dairy sector driven by movement toward higher yield cattle breeds | USDA
- The tough business of launching a natural food start-up | BizWest
- Kerala farmer uses cow manure for plantains, yields surprise all | Manorama online
- Cancer agency left in the dark over glyphosate evidence | Reuters
- The botanists’ last stand: The daring work of saving the last samples of dying species | Quartz
- Plant based products cannot use the word 'milk', EU court says | Farming UK
- Neighbors Clash over a Colorado Chicken Farm | HCN
- The state of U.S. agricultural production is changing. Over the next decade, increases to minimum wage and other changing labor regulations will have a dramatic impact on fruit, vegetable and other labor-intensive agricultural production in the U.S. | Farm Doc Daily
- The number of suicides among farmers and farmworkers in the United States has remained stubbornly high since the end of the 1980s farm crisis, much higher than workers in many other industries, according to a new study from the University of Iowa. | USAgnet
- Art Group Installs Pick-Your-Own-Fruit Parks Around Los Angeles | NPR The Salt
- Seven ancient grains - require few pesticides, fertilizers, or irrigation | Sierra Club
- Three effective methods for encouraging kids to eat their vegetables | MedicalXPress
- Coconut oil 'as unhealthy as beef fat and butter' | BBC
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