In defense of corn

Carrots in all shapes and sizes

Beware of robot farmhands?

Does using GMOs really increase pesticide use?
The Organic Center recently released Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years by Dr. Charles Benbrook, agricultural economist and “Chief Scientist” of the Organic Center. I can’t help but get the feeling that Dr. Benbrook started with a conclusion and found data to fit rather

Silicon Food
Do you know the consequences of calling some food “organic” and others not organic? Comic from Cowbirds in Love by Sanjay Kulkarni.h/t Nathaniel Ginder

A Vf gene a day keeps the fungus away
Ever gotten apples from the farmer’s market or grocery store only to have them go bad in the back of your fridge? I know I have. Just a few weeks ago, I got about 20 apples from the CSA. Unfortunately, I can only eat so many per day and they started to go bad before I got to eat them. Some of them got really nasty (as you can see to the right) within just a few days despite being in the fridge. Eating locally is great, but since apples only ripen once per year, and they spoil relat

We won!
Thanks to everyone who voted for Biofortified in the Ashoka Changemakers GMO Risk or Rescue contest. I’m delighted that so many people took the time to register and vote for science communiction! You can find more details about the competition over at Biofortified. Karl and I are really looking forward to our interview with Michael Pollan! Start thinking about questions you’d like us to ask :)

Sustainability in production ag and vice versa
The question of whether it is possible to create a sustainable production agriculture system has been passed around twitter (see #profood) quite a bit, which really got me thinking. Coincidentally, I also had to write a midterm essay in Foundations of Sustainable Agriculture, and one of the options for essays actually asked us to defend whether or not it was possible to have sustinability in a production system. I’ve made an effort to define both sustainability and productionism in thier strictest sense and then attempted to find one way that the ideals have been co