Agriculture

"A highly virulent bird flu first detected in dairy cows in Texas and Kansas this week has spread to additional herds, bringing the number of affected states to five and adding evidence the virus may be spreading cow-to-cow."

"Surveying the stripped landscape of her farm - dotted with pools of cyanide-tainted, tea coloured waste water left by illegal gold miners - is enough to make Janet Gyamfi break down. Only last year, the 27-hectare plot in western Ghana was covered with nearly 6,000 cocoa trees. Today, less than a dozen remain."

"State conservation officials have found no living fish in the East Nishnabotna River south of Red Oak — the result of a massive fertilizer spill at a farmers cooperative."

"As the agrichemical giant lays groundwork to fend off Roundup litigation, its use of a playbook for building influence in farm state legislatures has the potential to benefit pesticide companies nationwide."

"Growers’ use of the neurotoxic weed killer paraquat is concentrated in just five agricultural counties, leaving low-income Latinos disproportionately exposed to a chemical linked to Parkinson’s disease, a new analysis shows."

"More than a billion meals are thrown away every day, in poor countries as well as rich ones, despite more than 730 million people living in hunger around the world."

"“Barons,” published Tuesday by Austin Frerick, a native Iowan and Yale University food policy fellow, argues that a runaway process of monopoly has gutted rural America while bleeding the taste from American food."

"Alfalfa plants sway under a thin veil of mist as towering irrigation equipment rolls above the crops, spraying the vast fields with water. It's an important agriculture product in Mexico's northern state of Coahuila, grown there for hundreds of years."

"The Amazon is battling record early-year fires, fuelling fears of a worse climate crisis to come as blazes kill vegetation that is key to absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide. Fanned by drought, high winds and human felling, the forest is suffering unprecedented fires this early in the year, satellite images show, with the dry season still to reach critical parts of the Amazon."