Category Archives: Farming

Going vegan: can switching to a plant-based diet really save the planet?

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If politicians are serious about change, they need to incentivise it, say scientists and writers

The UK business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, is considering a “full vegan diet” to help tackle climate change, saying people will need to make lifestyle changes if the government is to meet its new emissions target of a 78% reduction on 1990 levels by 2035.

But how much difference would it make if everyone turned to a plant-based diet? Experts say that changing the way we eat is necessary for the future of the planet but that government policy is needed alongside this. If politicians are serious about wanting diet changes, they also need to incentivise it, scientists and writers add.

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Growing pains: Zimbabwe’s female tobacco farmers struggle to compete

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At the mercy of international markets and denied access to mainstream finance, the enterprising growers face a precarious existence

Moreen Tanhara waits patiently for officials to inspect her tobacco. The 49-year-old has travelled nearly 100 miles (150km) overnight in an old lorry to reach Tobacco Sales Floor, an auction house in Harare. Tanhara sits quietly on one of the fragrant sacks she has brought from Guruve, a farming area north of Zimbabwe’s capital, while on the auction floor workers prepare tobacco leaves for the first sales of the season.

Related: Zimbabwe urged to take action against child labour on tobacco farms

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Experience: I’ve had the same supper for 10 years

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I have two pieces of fish, an onion, an egg, baked beans and biscuits. Being a farmer means every day is the same

I have lived in the Teifi valley, in west Wales, all my life: 72 years. I’m a farmer and look after 71 sheep. My boyhood was spent helping my family on the farm. I have never wanted to run away from it, even as a young lad. This valley is cut in the shape of my heart. I once visited a farm in England, about 30 years ago; that was the only time I left Wales.

Many of the friends I grew up with left to find work in the big cities. As a young man, I was offered a job in Scotland on the oil rigs, but I could never leave. My heart belongs here with the birds and the trees. I knew, if I left, I’d be thinking about my valley the whole time, so what would be the point? All I want is right here.

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The knackerman: the toughest job in British farming

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Between accidents, disease and bad weather, farm animals are prey to so many disasters that dedicated professionals are called out to dispose of the casualties. It’s a grim task, and one that’s only getting more difficult

One bright morning in the middle of May, Ian Carswell’s tipper lorry came sliding to a halt in a Tenbury car park. It was a smallish thing with raw grey sides and nothing distinctive about it, the sort of truck that carries topsoil or aggregate all over the country.

“Jump in,” said Carswell, leaning over and prodding open the passenger door. The cab smelled of lemon air-freshener and self-consciousness. He wouldn’t normally allow a passenger, and almost certainly wouldn’t be taking one now if the boss hadn’t told him to.

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Purple revolution: India’s farmers turn to lavender to beat drought

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Faced with climate change, farmers in Jammu and Kashmir are switching from maize to essential oils

It’s late June and the field is glowing with fragrant purple as the women in their flowing shalwar kameez arrive with scythes to harvest the lavender. In the 30-odd villages on the hilly slopes of Jammu’s Doda district, more than 200 farmers have shifted from maize to lavender production, starting a “purple revolution” in the region.

The village of Lehrote had a moment of agricultural fame this year when a 43-year-old farmer, Bharat Bhushan, won a prestigious award for innovative farming from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, one of several institutions across the country looking to find ways of coping with the climate crisis and its devastating impact on farming. Lavender, a drought-resistant crop, can be grown on poor soil and likes lots of sun but needs little water.

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Best served chilled: green tech keeps the cool on India’s dairy farms – photo essay

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Photographer Prashanth Vishwanathan captured a network of community dairies helping off-grid farmers in Maharashtra keep milk fresh as temperatures rise. All pictures are from Climate Visuals

As global temperatures climb, a lack of refrigeration makes a big impact on people trying to make a living from farming. Especially dairy farms.

There are more than 75 million smallholder dairy farmers in India. Most are in off-grid areas without refrigeration, or reliant on expensive and polluting diesel generators. This locks people out of national supply chains, and farmers have to spend hours transporting milk to markets, or sell at a lower price to middlemen. In Maharashtra, western India, a network of community dairies has been set up, using sustainable refrigeration technology, where people can bring their milk to be tested, chilled, and sold on.

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Toxic impact of pesticides on bees has doubled, study shows

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Analysis contradicts claims that the environmental impact of pesticides is falling, say scientists

The toxic impact of pesticides on bees and other pollinators has doubled in a decade, new research shows, despite a fall in the amount of pesticide used.

Modern pesticides have much lower toxicity to people, wild mammals and birds and are applied in lower amounts, but they are even more toxic to invertebrates. The study shows the higher toxicity outweighs the lower volumes, leading to a more deadly overall impact on pollinators and waterborne insects such as dragonflies and mayflies.

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‘You can’t escape the smell’: mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

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Locals who have endured months of mice and rats getting into their houses, stores and cars are praying heavy rain will help wipe them out
Warning: graphic images may disturb some readers

Drought, fire, the Covid-19 pestilence and an all-consuming plague of mice. Rural New South Wales has faced just about every biblical challenge nature has to offer in the last few years, but now it is praying for another – an almighty flood to drown the mice in their burrows and cleanse the blighted land of the rodents. Or some very heavy rain, at least.

It seems everyone in the rural towns of north-west NSW and southern Queensland has their own mouse war story. In posts online, they detail waking up to mouse droppings on their pillows or watching the ground move at night as hundreds of thousands of rodents flee from torchlight beams.

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Century-old olive trees felled as Spain’s farmers try to cut costs

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Plunge in global olive oil prices means hard decisions for Spanish olive oil producers

Century-old olive trees are being chopped up to use as firewood or sold off as garden ornaments as some in Spain’s olive oil industry turn to younger, more productive trees in hope of lowering costs.

In recent years the sector in Spain has been left reeling; a plunge in global olive oil prices was followed by a punishing 25% tariff levied by the US on Spanish olive oil. After prices sank to levels that left many struggling to break even, the industry has slowly recovered, though prices remain shy of 2018 levels.

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Can red wolves come back from the brink of extinction again?

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Once a US conservation success story, numbers in the wild have plummeted. Now a court has given hope for their survival

There are perhaps no more than 10 red wolves left in the wild, and they are all in just one place: North Carolina.

It is an astonishing statistic for a species once hailed as undergoing the most successful reintroduction programme in the US, providing the blueprint for Yellowstone national park’s much-lauded grey wolf rewilding project.

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The UN food systems summit will consider all stakeholders’ interests | Letter

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Dr Agnes Kalibata responds to a report on the 2021 summit that she is leading as a special envoy for the UN secretary general

As you note in your article (Farmers and rights groups boycott food summit over big business links, 4 March), farmers have for too long been on the fringes of global discussions about hunger, poverty and climate change, despite being the frontline of our food systems and the custodians of our natural resources.

The UN food systems summit marks a momentous opportunity for farmers, producers and many others who support them to be at the heart of the year-long consultative process that has been launched to improve our shared food system.

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Spanish farmers deeply split as ban on hunting wolves is extended

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The predators, protected in the south, are widely blamed for attacks on livestock but some think coexistence is possible

“There have always been wolves. We humans have hunted and killed all the animals around us because we want everything for ourselves,” says Laura Serrano Isla, who tends her flock of 650 sheep near Burgos in north-west Spain.

“We think we rule the world but if we kill all the rest of the animals, the wolf will come for our livestock.”

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Cows might fly: Ireland to jet calves to Europe to cut travel time

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Expanding dairy herds have seen surplus male calves shipped to the continent for veal, but there is unease over welfare conditions

Irish authorities have announced plans to fly unweaned dairy calves from Ireland to other EU destinations from May, in an effort to address growing unease about the length of the journeys made by thousands of animals shipped each year to mainland Europe.

The Irish government has been subject to sustained scrutiny over live calf exports and the decision to experiment with flights, which will significantly cut travel time, comes as a European parliament committee of inquiry examines alleged failures across Europe in enforcing rules on protecting transported animals.

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Farmers and rights groups boycott food summit over big business links

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Focus on agro-business rather than ecology has split groups invited to planned UN conference on hunger

An international food summit to address growing hunger and diet-related disease is in disarray as hundreds of farmers’ and human rights groups are planning a boycott.

Related: 'A shame for the world': Uganda's fragile forest ecosystem destroyed for sugar

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Eating meat ‘raises risk of heart disease, diabetes and pneumonia’

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UK researchers find link between regular meat intake and nine non-cancerous illnesses

Eating meat regularly increases someone’s risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia and other serious illnesses, research has found.

It is already known that intake of red and processed meat heightens the risk of being diagnosed with bowel cancer. But these findings are the first to assess whether meat consumption is linked to any of the 25 non-cancerous illnesses that most commonly lead to people being admitted to hospital in the UK.

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Meatless school menu sparks political row in France

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Temporary decision by Green mayor of Lyon to take meat off menu met by protests

A decision by the Green mayor of Lyon, seen by many as the country’s culinary capital, to temporarily take meat off the menu in school canteens during the coronavirus pandemic has sparked a major political row in France.

Government ministers have accused the mayor, Grégory Doucet, of “ideological” and “elitist” behaviour after the measure, which is also being studied by several other cities including Paris, came into force in Lyon’s schools on Monday.

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Australia’s dingo fence from space: satellite images reveal its effects on landscape

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Dingoes eat kangaroos and kangaroos eat grass. So on the side of the fence where dingoes are rare, there is less vegetation

As one of the longest structures in the world, the dingo fence is an Australian landmark. It stretches more than 5,600km across three states, including 150km that traverses the red sand dunes of the Strzelecki Desert.

Since it was established in the early 20th century, the fence has had one job: to keep dingoes out. The effect of this on the environment has been enormous – you can see it from outer space.

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Risk of global food shortages due to Covid has increased, says UN envoy

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Exclusive: Agnes Kalibata says price rises and scarcity mean people in poverty are in more danger than last year

People living in poverty around the world are in danger of food shortages as the coronavirus crisis continues, the UN’s food envoy has warned, with the risk worse this year than in the period shortly after the pandemic began.

Agnes Kalibata, the special envoy to the UN secretary general for the food systems summit 2021, said: “Food systems have contracted, because of Covid-19. And food has become more expensive and, in some places, out of reach for people. Food is looking more challenging this year than last year.”

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UK-US Brexit trade deal ‘could fill supermarkets with cancer-risk bacon’

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Fears of illness over nitrites used in US but currently banned in Britain and EU

British stores could be flooded with “dangerous” bacon and ham from the US, marketed under misleading labels, as the result of a transatlantic trade deal, says the author of a new book based on a decade of investigation into the food industry.

The meat has been cured with nitrites extracted from vegetables, a practice not permitted by the European Commission because of evidence that it increases the risk of bowel cancer. But it is allowed in the US, where the product is often labelled as “all natural”. The powerful US meat industry is likely to insist that the export of nitrite-cured meat is a condition of a post-Brexit UK-US trade deal, which the UK government is under intense pressure to deliver.

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