Adlar Stelly is 42 years old, which means it is fair to say that he has been involved in farming crawfish in Louisiana for just shy of 42 years. He grew up surrounded by the shallow ponds dotted with the netted crawfish traps set by his father. At 7, he was steering the boat while […]
Read MoreTag: Agriculture and Farming
Can Europe Save Forests Without Killing Jobs in Malaysia?
The European Union’s upcoming ban on imports linked to deforestation has been hailed as a “gold standard” in climate policy: a meaningful step to protect the world’s forests, which help remove planet-killing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The law requires traders to trace the origins of a head-spinning variety of products — beef to books, […]
Read MoreCan Europe Save Forests Without Killing Jobs in Malaysia?
The European Union’s upcoming ban on imports linked to deforestation has been hailed as a “gold standard” in climate policy: a meaningful step to protect the world’s forests, which help remove planet-killing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The law requires traders to trace the origins of a head-spinning variety of products — beef to books, […]
Read MoreGlobal Warming Is Particularly Bad for Women-Led Families, Study Says
Extreme heat is making some of the world’s poorest women poorer. That is the stark conclusion of a report, released Tuesday, by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based on weather and income data in 24 low- and middle-income countries. The report adds to a body of work that shows how global warming, driven […]
Read More‘Pretty Sickening’: Texas Ranchers Face Crippling Losses
Justin Homan kept driving across his vast Texas ranch, but he only found the same bleak scenes: blackened grassland, charred cow carcasses and smoldering debris turned almost entirely to ash. Then he arrived at the place he thinks of as a hidden oasis: a pond and small lake that, in better times, bask in the […]
Read MoreThe Farming Conundrum
Two news stories this week — one that made headlines, and one that got less attention — point to the fiendish difficulty of reinventing agriculture to reduce its heavy toll on the climate. The first development: The New York attorney general Letitia James, fresh off a $450 million civil verdict against Donald Trump, announced a […]
Read MoreClimate Change Is Driving Animal Sanctuaries To Relocate
About 18 months ago, Catskill Animal Sanctuary in Saugerties, N.Y., rescued 42 neglected and ailing sheep. Many were anemic and had foot rot, a contagious bacterial disease that can be life-threatening if left untreated in wet environments. For the animals to recover, they should be in a clean and dry place, said Kathy Stevens, the […]
Read MoreLab-Made Meat? Florida Lawmakers Don’t Like the Sound of It.
Lab grown meat. It sounds like a plotline from a sci-fi movie about test-tube chicken fingers, but it’s a real thing. Start-up companies around the world are competing to develop technologies for producing chicken, beef, salmon and other options without the need to raise and slaughter animals. China has made the development of the industry […]
Read MoreMaking Farming More Climate Friendly Is Hard. Just Ask Europe’s Politicians.
The farmers’ protests in Europe are a harbinger of the next big political challenge in global climate action: How to grow food without further damaging Earth’s climate and biodiversity. On Tuesday, after weeks of intense protests in several cities across the continent, came the most explicit sign of that difficulty. The European Union’s top official, […]
Read MoreTrump’s Tariffs Hurt U.S. Jobs but Swayed American Voters, Study Says
The sweeping tariffs that former President Donald J. Trump imposed on China and other American trading partners were simultaneously a political success and an economic failure, a new study suggests. That’s because the levies won over voters for the Republican Party even though they did not bring back jobs. The nonpartisan working paper examines monthly […]
Read MoreFrench Farmers Are Urged by Unions to End Roadblocks
France’s main farmer’s unions called on Thursday for an end to roadblocks across the country after expressing cautious satisfaction with a flurry of new government announcements to appease them, in the first sign of a possible reprieve after more than a week of protests disrupted traffic nationwide. It was not immediately clear whether the approximately […]
Read MoreEU Ukraine Aid Deal Is a Pawn in Orban’s Longer Populist Game
After months of bluster against financial aid for Ukraine, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary on Thursday yielded to intense pressure from fellow European leaders, but not before he tried to change the topic in Brussels by meeting with angry Belgian farmers beside a convoy of tractors and voicing support for the protests roiling Europe. […]
Read MoreFrench Farmer Was Spark Behind Widespread Protests
Jérôme Bayle had spent seven nights on a major French highway, leading a group of aggrieved farmers in protest, when the prime minister arrived, dressed in his Parisian blue suit and tie, to thank them for “making France proud” and announced he would meet their demands. Before camera flashes and outstretched microphones, Mr. Bayle told […]
Read MoreU.S. Weighs Retaliation After Strike in Jordan, and Farmers Lay ‘Siege’ to Paris
The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists […]
Read MoreFrench Farmers Block Roads Around Paris in Growing Standoff
Irate farmers deployed tractors to block the main roads in and out of Paris on Monday in an intensifying standoff that has left the capital girding for disruptions and become the first major test for France’s newly appointed prime minister, Gabriel Attal. Last week Mr. Attal rushed to farming regions in the south of France […]
Read MoreProtesters at the Louvre Hurl Soup at the Mona Lisa
Two protesters from an environmental group hurled pumpkin-colored soup on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, splashing the bulletproof glass that protects the most famous painting in the world, but not apparently damaging the work itself. As the customary crowd around the 16th-century painting by Leonardo da Vinci gasped in […]
Read MoreFrance Tries to Contain Protests by Farmers as Outrage Spreads
Protests by farmers angered by complex regulations, administrative hassles and low wages spread across France on Friday, blocking several highways, snarling traffic for miles and forcing the country’s new prime minister to tear up his schedule and head to a remote farm in the region where the demonstrations began. Gabriel Attal, the 34-year-old prime minister […]
Read MoreA ‘Revolutionary’ Way to Feed the World That’s Very Old
“There are some interesting hints or nods in the right direction: the focus on crop diversity and nutrition, Indigenous knowledge, a focus on neglected crops,” said Bill Moseley, a professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., who has worked on agriculture programs with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank. “What’s […]
Read MoreAustria’s Schnapps Distilleries Tempt Winter Tourists and Skiers
When winter arrives in western Austria and the sun disappears all too quickly behind the snow-capped Alps, you can stand in bare orchards and still taste the sun-ripened fruit that the trees once bore — just sip a glass of schnapps. For centuries, farmers in the Tyrol region have mashed, fermented and distilled apples, plums, […]
Read MoreAs Switzerland’s Glaciers Shrink, a Way of Life May Melt Away
For centuries, Swiss farmers have sent their cattle, goats and sheep up the mountains to graze in warmer months before bringing them back down at the start of autumn. Devised in the Middle Ages to save precious grass in the valleys for winter stock, the tradition of “summering” has so transformed the countryside into a […]
Read MoreAround the Wine World, Daughters Are Taking Leadership Roles
As a young woman growing up in the Chianti Classico town of Radda-in-Chianti in Tuscany, Angela Fronti was sure of one thing: She did not want to join her family’s business, doing agricultural work for wineries. She was far more interested in making wine herself, so she earned a degree in winemaking and found jobs […]
Read MoreCalifornia Farms Dried Up a River for Months. Nobody Stopped Them.
During California’s most recent drought, officials went to great lengths to safeguard water supplies, issuing emergency regulations to curb use by thousands of farms, utilities and irrigation districts. It still wasn’t enough to prevent growers in the state’s agricultural heartland from draining dry several miles of a major river for almost four months in 2022, […]
Read MoreKona Coffee Lawsuit: How Science Helped Farmers Look for Counterfeit Beans
On the volcanic slopes of Hawaii’s Big Island, hundreds of farmers in the Kona region produce one of the most expensive coffees in the world. Those farmers recently won a series of settlements — totaling more than $41 million — after a nearly five-year legal battle with distributors and retailers that were accused of using […]
Read MoreWhen Hakim Jeffrey, 24, Met Hakeem Jeffries, 53
Growing up, Hakim Jeffrey did not think much about politics. But people would often point out that his name sounded very similar to the name of his representative in Congress, a rising star in the House and fellow Brooklyn native. “All of them would just tell me, ‘You should meet this man some day,’” Mr. […]
Read MoreIn Colombia, a Park for Anacondas and Anteaters, Where Ranchers Are Now Rangers
Already, though, the rangers had made a difference. They had established the government’s presence in a formerly anything-goes region. Thanks to their outreach in San Martín, they had been invited in November to march in the annual parade celebrating the cuadrillas. Mr. Zorro thought that the invitation was a turning point for the park, a […]
Read MoreDrought Touches a Quarter of Humanity, U.N. Says, Disrupting Lives Globally
Pandemic. War. Now drought. Olive groves have shriveled in Tunisia. The Brazilian Amazon faces its driest season in a century. Wheat fields have been decimated in Syria and Iraq, pushing millions more into hunger after years of conflict. The Panama Canal, a vital trade artery, doesn’t have enough water, which means fewer ships can pass […]
Read MoreMexican Whiskey Is on the Rise, Powered by Ancient Corn
Of the 59 varieties of native corn in Mexico, nal t’eel is one of the oldest, having emerged in the Yucatán Peninsula some 4,000 years ago. It grows quickly, largely unbothered by heavy rains or drought — so robust that the Mayans called it “rooster corn.” Like almost all of Mexico’s indigenous corn varieties, nal […]
Read MoreDon’t Flee the American Southwest Just Yet
This summer, when the temperature hit 110 degrees Fahrenheit or above in Phoenix for 31 straight days, many were fretting about the Southwest’s prospects in the age of climate change. A writer for The Atlantic asked, “When Will the Southwest Become Unlivable?” The Washington Post wondered, “How Long Can We Keep Living in Hotboxes Like […]
Read MorePhilippine Poverty and Farm-Based Economy Have Roots in Colonial Era
Rodino Sawan stepped into the wire harness and dug his toes into the muddy track that threads the sweltering plantation. He pushed forward, straining against the cargo trailing behind him: 25 bunches of freshly harvested bananas strung from hooks attached to an assembly line. Six days a week, Mr. Sawan, 55, a father of five, […]
Read MoreWorkers on a Philippines Coconut Farm: Born Poor, Staying Poor
Like most of the those working in the coconut groves that fill out the northern lip of the Philippine island of Mindanao, Diego G. Limbaro has never imagined another life. His father pulled himself up the skinny tree trunks of the surrounding plantations, wielding a machete to detach coconuts. So did his father’s father. Such […]
Read MoreYacouba Sawadogo, African Farmer Who Held Back the Desert, Dies at 77
Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer known as “the man who beat the desert” in Burkina Faso for revolutionizing agricultural methods and creating a 75-acre forest on barren land, died on Dec. 3 in Ouahigouya, a northern provincial capital in that West African country. He was 77. His death, in a hospital after a long illness, was […]
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