Word: farmlands
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...what if biofuels could be made without food crops, using an inedible plant grown on less than optimum farmland? That's exactly the thinking behind the push to develop cellulosic ethanol from the waste plant switchgrass, which grows throughout the Midwestern prairies, with little input from farmers. Instead of fuel from food, switchgrass cellulosic ethanol promises fuel from virtually nothing - and a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) argues that it's worth making the switch...
From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania to the Bay Area farmland of California, small mom-and-pop distilleries have begun making liquor out of all kinds of fruits and grains. They account for a drop in the bucket of the $58 billion spirits industry (a brand like Smirnoff outsells the combined annual production of these small distilleries in a single week), but their liquors often are distinctive in taste, are creatively bottled and fit the trend for locally produced foods. "The microdistilling industry is exactly where the microbrew industry was 20 years ago," says Bill Owens, a brewmaster...
Captured potato peelings will be used to fertilize farmland. High-tech filters will recycle wastewater and use it to power the plant...
...makes it not only particularly susceptible to the effects of climate change but also extremely hard to protect. Most of Bangladesh sits on the giant alluvial delta created by the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, whose courses are constantly shifting, making it difficult to build up river banks to protect farmland. A World Bank project, backed by France, Japan and the U.S., would construct 8,000 km of dikes to control the rivers, but the $10 billion proposal has run into opposition from farmers whose land it would take. Massive Dutch-style dikes to hold back the sea - and future cyclone...
...result is that farm payments that used to cost a few billion dollars a year have averaged $17 billion. They'll be lower this year because commodity prices are so high. But owners of eligible farmland will still get direct payments regardless of how much their farms earn or whether their farms are still farmed. And even though crop-insurance subsidies have increased nearly tenfold, farmers will still receive disaster aid if things go badly, no matter how often that happens. More than 21,000 farmers have cashed at least 11 disaster checks each in the past 21 years...