Agriculture

"DUJIADUN, China -- Liu Changxiong has been farming in this southwestern Chinese village for more than a decade, but his years of experience aren't of much use these days."

Cattle grazed on land containing abandoned uranium mines in the West are being sold for food. What hazards, if any, this may present to people consuming the beef are unknown.

"The federal government has taken a step toward wide distribution of gasoline with 15 percent ethanol by allowing the biofuel’s manufacturers to register as suppliers."

"North Dakota farmer Justin Zahradka will plant wheat this spring on 40 acres that has been off-limits for two decades, protected by a government conservation program that is shrinking as high crop prices make farmland more valuable."

"TORONTO — The loosening of rules around spreading sewage sludge -- potentially laced with pharmaceuticals like Viagra -- on Ontario farm fields has critics sounding the alarm about potential health risks."

"The search for the killer of America's bees is a little bit like an Agatha Christie novel. Suspicion has turned toward one shady character and then another: declining habitat; parasites; diseases; pesticides.

Or did they all conspire in the recent mass murder of the country's bees?

"Tia Jackson’s family has lived on the same block of Halsey Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for five generations. Kristen Rapp is a newcomer. Jackson is black. Rapp is white. In a part of town where the gentrification process has been grinding along painfully for years, the two might never have met if not for a sign on a fence on a vacant lot, left there by the members of a group called 596 Acres."

"Scientists, environmentalists and farm advocates are pressing the question about whether rewards of the trend toward using more and more crop chemicals are worth the risks, as the agricultural industry strives to ramp up production to feed the world's growing population."