Drone sales to agriculture companies are expanding 22% a year Asia palm plantations cover an area about the size of the U.K. As haze blanketed large tracts of Southeast Asia last month, office workers with Genting Plantations Bhd. in Jakarta were investigating the source of the choking smoke more than a thousand …
EVANSVILLE, Ind., Nov. 13 (UPI) — Farmers across the Midwest were fighting Wednesday — through snow and freezing temperatures — to harvest their crops. “We’re way behind,” said Jim Zook, the executive director of the Michigan Corn Growers Association. “But, farmers will continue to harvest until there is nothing left in …
As the seasonal harvest approaches, ‘ghost groves’ abandoned by growers are scattered across the state. ‘We’re in a race right now to save the Florida citrus industry,’ a researcher said. ODESSA, Fla. — Through a tiny office window behind William Kennedy Burchenal’s desk, a row of sickly orange trees could …
SOMIS, Calif. — Thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles, the Lemon Hill grove — a square mile of rolling slopes covered with healthy young trees, laden with fragrant yellow fruit — evokes the Arcadian vistas of classic citrus crate labels. Everything looks familiar, but inside the lemons there’s a crucial …
Bulging pork-belly stockpiles come after build in hog herd As China imports https://slinkingtowardretirement.com/files/more pork, the belly glut could evaporate america is sitting on a mountain of uneaten bacon. more than 40 million pounds (18,000 metric tons) of pork bellies, the cut used for bacon making, were sitting in refrigerated warehouses as …
SPOKANE, Wash. — They call it the Cosmic Crisp. It’s not a video game, a superhero or the title of a Grateful Dead song. It’s a new variety of apple, coming to a grocery store near you Dec. 1. Cosmic Crisp is the first apple ever bred in Washington state, …
Chad Dechow, a geneticist at Pennsylvania State University who studies dairy cows, is explaining how all of America’s cows ended up so similar to each other. He brings up a website on his computer. “This is the company Select Sires,” he says. It’s one of just a few companies in …
ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 7 (UPI) — Florida grapefruit growers are trying to help preserve the industry with new plantings, taking a risky step in the face of disease and storms that continue to decimate their groves. Two large grapefruit growers on the state’s Atlantic coast have committed to planting 1,500 acres …
In a good year, Jesús García Ramos can feed his family all year on the corn that he grows in small fields around his home in the Guatemalan village of Quilinco. But this was not a good year. On a visit in August, I met García Ramos in the field …
EVANSVILLE, Ind., Oct. 4 (UPI) — The Trump administration may require large oil refineries to increase ethanol in their fuels next year to make up for the U.S. waiving ethanol blending requirements at 31 small refineries this summer. Farmers around the county welcomed the news Friday because they had feared those …
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa — On a typical day, about 80 tractor trailers full of corn line up to dump their loads at Siouxland Energy Cooperative, the ethanol plant just outside of town. The air throbs with the noise and vibration of this industrial moonshine operation, which distills nature’s harvest into …
But their governments are standing in the way An air of Malthusian gloom hangs over smallhold farmers in Sironko, in eastern Uganda. In the old days, they say, their parents reaped plentiful harvests from fields fed with manure. Now the soil needs to be coaxed into life with chemical fertilisers they …
