Farming

Humans have come up with a number of wacky methods to keep animals deemed "vermin" in check.

Seven of the Wildest and Weirdest Attempts to Curb Animal Pests

Why use fences or traps, when you can use deadly viruses or lustful snakes?

Rice is a major staple crop around the world.

Perennial Rice Could Raise Yields and Cut Costs

These plants that grow back year after year show promise, but they are not a silver bullet

Under the right conditions, researchers say, some crop yields could increase by 50 percent or more.

Is Hacking Photosynthesis the Key to Increasing Crop Yields?

It’s an agricultural moonshot, but scientists hope to make plants like corn, wheat and barley as heat and drought resistant as cactus

Cows produced more saliva and snot, were wobbly on their feet and moved their tongues around a lot after eating high-cannabinoid hemp.

Cows That Ate Hemp Produced Milk With THC and CBD

New research adds insights to the debate over using industrial hemp as livestock feed

Truffles have spread around the world, including to countries in South America.

How Truffles Took Root Around the World

For centuries, the wild delicacy grew only in Europe. But improved cultivation techniques have enabled the pricey fungus to be farmed in new places.

The centuries-old tradition involves sorting these woolly creatures after a summer of free-grazing on mountain grasses and berries in the highlands.

Iceland's Annual Tradition of Counting Sheep Is Far From Sleepy

Every fall, across the country, farmers and their friends and family gather to sort the ewes and rams that spent the summer free-grazing

Prickly pear fruit growing on cactus

Is There a Market for Edible Cactus in the United States?

Often treated as a weed, the versatile prickly pear cactus could be the next big specialty crop

Frozen chemicals across the country could thaw and make their way into groundwater and surface water during winters, research suggests.

Once-Frozen Chemicals Could Pollute Water as Winters Warm

Thawing agricultural nutrients threaten streams, lakes and rivers across the country, new research suggests

Palestinian farmer Salman al-Nabahin cleans the mosaic he uncovered in Gaza.

Cool Finds

Palestinian Farmer Unearths Byzantine-Era Mosaic While Planting Olive Trees

The stunning, colorful flooring depicts 17 iconographies of birds and animals

An experimental vineyard at Cornell AgriTech’s McCarthy Farm in Geneva, New York, where researchers are studying hybrid grapes

Are Hybrid Grapes the Future of Wine?

Scientists, growers and winemakers are working with experimental varieties to adapt to the effects of climate change

Ads like this one for Tesco turkey in London may no longer be allowed in the Dutch city of Haarlem starting in 2024.

A Dutch City Is Banning Some Meat Advertisements in Public Spaces

The climate change-motivated move is accompanied by bans on fossil fuel ads elsewhere in the Netherlands

A worker sorts coffee beans at the Lamastus Family Estate farm in Boquete, a region known the world over for its coffee varieties.

Panama

Experience Panama's Coffee Farming Tradition in the Chiriquí Highlands

A coffee circuit connects 15 farms that offer tours and tastings in what's been called the "Napa Valley of coffee"

North Dakota’s sunflower superbloom is underway.

See the Incredible Sunflower Superbloom in North Dakota

Fields filled with the cheery yellow flowers reach peak bloom in late summer

Cotton fields

It's Time for the Fashion Industry to Launch a Farm-to-Closet Movement

For fiber and textile producers, the path to growing sustainable cotton, hemp and flax is complicated

Dropping water levels in Lake Mead, a reservoir of the Colorado River, revealed this formerly submerged boat.

Western States Are Fighting Over How to Conserve Shrinking Water Supply

The Colorado River, which supplies water to 40 million people, is drying up

Archaeologists excavate the remains of friars buried at the former Augustinian friary in central Cambridge.

Why Were Medieval Monks So Susceptible to Intestinal Worms?

Friars in Cambridge, England, suffered from these parasites at nearly double the rate found among average unwashed citizens

An adult spotted lanternfly

People are ‘Hunting’ Invasive Spotted Lanternflies—And You Should, Too

Officials urge the public to squish the bugs, which are damaging crops and trees in the eastern U.S.

As the North Carolina farmed oyster industry grows, advocates hope to fuel consumer demand and build the industry’s profile with a tourism “trail.”

North Carolina's Oyster Trail Aims to Give the Farmed Shellfish Industry a Boost

In the tradition of wine and ale trails, the state’s new tourism offering highlights restaurants, farms, festivals and markets

On Calvert Island, British Columbia, the subtle rock line of an extant clam garden is a reminder of how Indigenous peoples turned the sea into a shellfish garden.

How Indigenous Sea Gardens Produced Massive Amounts of Food for Millennia

Communities created bountiful food without putting populations at risk of collapse

The gophers spend most of their time underground and only venture to the outside world to forage for food or mate.

Pocket Gophers May Be the First Non-Human Mammal to 'Farm'

The rodents don't plant, of course, but they do tend to roots in their tunnels that they then eat

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