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The corn herbicide from Syngenta effectively mitigates weed pressure during both wet and dry seasons Most growing seasons since the COVID-19 pandemic have been dogged by drought, which has complicated farmers’ efforts to plant corn earlier in the season and manage the logistics of large-scale acreage. A surprisingly wet 2024 didn’t improve the situation either, as excessively wet fields through the early months of spring meant that many growers had less than 5 percent of their planting completed even into late May. The weather events that disrupt planting schedules are not insignificant … and some can be major. In 2023,…

U.S. tractor and combine sales did not start 2025 off strong, and those sluggish performances continued into February, according to the latest data released from the Association of Equipment Manufacturers. The organization showed that U.S. sales of agricultural tractors declined 17.7 percent in February compared with the same month in 2024, while U.S. sales of combines dropped 48 percent. The biggest change on the tractor side involved 4WD farm tractors, which fell more than 41 percent — and year-to-date, the number is even more dire. “While the recent decline in agricultural tractor and combine sales reflect current market challenges, including…

Guest “Surfing the Radcliffe Wave” by David Middleton, Approximately 34 million years ago (mya), during the Early Oligocene Epoch, the Earth entered its current “icehouse” climate mode, with ice sheets covering Antarctica. After warming up again towards the end of the Oligocene, Earth’s climate began a long cooling trend, punctuated by a brief warm period during the Late to Middle Miocene Epoch. Figure 1. Cenozoic Era climate reconstruction rom Zachos et al., 2001 (older is toward the bottom). The Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum (MMCO) was an anomalous warm interval from ~17 to ~14 mya. The incorrect assumption that CO2 is…

Emerging from stealth last year with a cool $100 million in funding, plant breeding startup Ohalo has generated a lot of buzz with its ‘boosted breeding’ technology. So what is it, and why is it creating what CEO Dave Friedberg calls a “Holy Shit” moment for breeders? Speaking to AgFunderNews at the World Agri-Tech summit in San Francisco yesterday, Friedberg gave us the lowdown on the approach, which effectively ensures the progeny of two plants will get all the traits of interest by ensuring that both parents pass on their entire genome to their offspring. Uniform seed The tech, which deploys proteins to effectively…

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.A towering, two-story arch, trimmed in barrel tiles with an all-caps marquee, makes it very clear where you are: “BIENVENIDOS A LITTLE VILLAGE.” The structure rises high above bustling 26th Street in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, where independent restaurants, retails, and street vendors make it one of the highest-grossing commercial corridors in Chicago. This is the threshold of the Little Village neighborhood, home to many immigrants from Central America as well as the largest community of…

Photo credit: Randy Harris, courtesy of Chelsea Green PublishingGussow helped us understand that buying locally grown, seasonal food (and raising it ourselves, if possible) connected us to the health of the land, and to our own health, too. And because of her, we began to understand the deleterious impacts of the industrialized food system—among them depleted soil, poisoned water, and metabolic disease. She railed at politicians for setting back progress and, as she told us in an interview, “You have to keep hope alive, you have to keep moving along the way you believe in and keep telling the truth and…

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT By Paul Homewood You may have heard a cringeworthy advert on the radio recently from the Woodland Trust. It features a woman putting on a soppy voice droning on about the “climate crisis”. She is advertising this campaign: The climate crisis is having a profound impact on nature. It’s urgent that we understand how wildlife is coping with shifting seasons, warmer temperatures and unpredictable weather patterns.  Climate change has already accelerated spring’s arrival by an average of 8.4 days compared to the early 1900s. Now, we need you to help us find…

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC by Chris Morrison Sensational new discoveries arising from long-forgotten early aerial photographs indicate that ice has remained stable and even grown slightly since the 1930s over a 2,000 km stretch of East Antarctica. In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Copenhagen came to their conclusions by tracking glacial movement in an area with as much ice as the Greenland ice sheet. The findings are unlikely to feature in narrative-driven mainstream media. The silence will probably replicate the response to another recent paper that found the ice shelves surrounding Antarctica grew…

Cedar trees and other woody plants can significantly reduce forage production for livestock (Figure 2. These trees compete for and steal precious water and soil nutrients away from our desirable pasture forage. By letting trees fester into grasslands, forage production can be exponentially reduced over time (Figure 3). As a result, stocking rate will be severely compromised over time. In 2022 alone, South Dakota experienced a loss of 209,671 tons of forage (419,342,000 pounds) due to woody plant encroachment. Additionally, the amount of tree cover increased by 3% (South Dakota Rangeland Production Losses). Among many other wildlife and natural resource concerns,…

Over the past several weeks, farmers and farm groups with USDA grant contracts have been reeling from uncertainty caused by the agency’s funding freeze. At the same time, cancellation letters terminating individual grant contracts based on stated commitments to equity and diversity began to trickle in.Now, deeper cuts are coming into focus. Last night, Marcia Brown at Politico reported the agency officially ended two local food programs expanded under Biden to connect small farms to school meals and hunger assistance programs like food banks. Organizations with active contracts in those programs told Civil Eats they were devastated by the cuts.And…