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by Natasha Lasky, ODP Staff Writer While humans have been domesticating crops for the past 10,000 years, we also need wild variants of the crops we cultivate as they have traits that make them more resistant to disease and resilient to environmental changes. We can breed these traits into our domesticated crops. But a new […]
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by Natasha Lasky, ODP Staff Writer Despite facing droughts and record heat, California’s almond farmers have had record-breaking harvests over the last five years. That said, California’s nuts may be under threat once again as the rise in global temperatures may introduce a new pest to the California farm ecosystem. This pest, the navel orangeworm, […]
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by Amy Lupica, ODP Staff Writer A first-of-its-kind study has found that in the next 20 years, 1.6 billion people will be affected by crumbling aquifers. Subsidence, the degradation of aquifers due to over-extraction of water and drought, causes the earth to cave in reducing aquifers’ ability to hold water and puts communities at risk […]
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by Julia Fine, ODP Contributing Writer This past weekend’s weather was hot in Iowa and Illinois. But it likely felt even hotter, due to “another episode of corn-catalyzed extreme humidity,” Matthew Cappucci reported in The Washington Post. “Corn sweat,” or the water released into the atmosphere by crops like corn as a cooling mechanism, helped […]
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Over the past 50 years, fewer crops are feeding the world’s people and diets around the world are becoming more alike. This puts us at risk of a “globalized diet” based on major crops such as soybeans, wheat, rice, and corn–which are grown on almost half the world’s agricultural lands.
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Here's where the #CropWatch19 #soybeans will be planted in central Kansas, if it ever dries out. pic.twitter.com/w9DkokOlUG — Karen Braun (@kannbwx) May 28, 2019 All across the midwest farmers are not able to begin planting their crops as persistent flooding has caused their fields to resemble shallow lakes. As Reuters explained, “Excessive rain has caused […]
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