Microbial Magic Could Help Slash Your Dinner's Carbon Footprint

The fate of the Southeast's longleaf pine forests, and the endangered woodpeckers that depend on them, is in jeopardy. Fort Bragg, a station of the US military, is trying to save their local environment.

What we sometimes call the “agri-food system” is broken — just ask farmworkers and food workers (exploited, underpaid), honeybees (collapsing), forested landscapes (fragmenting), the climate (warming), and the ever-growing number of people without access to nutritious food, or the land and resources with which to produce it. But a new branch of sustainability, agroecology, helps farmers and researchers develop farming practices that enhance soil fertility, recycle nutrients, optimize the use of energy and water, and, perhaps most importantly, increase the beneficial interactions of organisms in ecosystems.

In India, many farmers, especially women farmers, have transitioned to organic farming. While it requires a serious set of skills and knowledge, organic farming increases yields and decreases costs by eliminating the need to buy pesticides. The move is both ecological and economical, and the Indian government is trying to spread the solution.

Property rights, circumscribed jurisdictions, and conflicts with neighbors exacerbate Native American efforts to restore tribal land and resources. Some tribes have found success by tapping into a trend of support from the government and conservationists.

Farmland is expensive and scarce in urban areas. In Boston Higher Ground Farm uses green roofs to grow its produce and Grove Lab has designed a cabinet for people to grow their vegetables indoors.

More than 30-meters below the busy London streets, there is an eco-farm called Growing Underground that's part innovative agri-tech project and part sci-fi inspired netherworld. Created to provide increased food security and combat the environmental degradation caused by mass agriculture, this self-contained, zero-emissions, fully functioning farm provides an exciting opportunity as the world's population grows and food demands increase.

In Australia, the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council was formed after a severe drought to bring together federal, state and regional governments and bridge parochial concerns. It was meant to manage the basin as a whole and end overuse and salinization of farm land, leveraging new technologies to adapt to new realities.

A Kenyan government initiative is helping a growing community of residents to tackle food insecurity in one of the largest slum areas in Africa, championing an unusual form of urban farming: sack gardens.

University research in Kansas and California is providing technical solutions for small farmers to help them compete against large scale farms.

The demand for food crops is increasing globally while the crop resilience is decreasing due to a warming climate and elevated CO2 levels. Scientists in Washington, DC are testing how to cross food crops with weeds, which have resilience against heat and many other environmental challenges.