Agriculture

"After their homeowner association ordered them to replace their wildlife-friendly plants with turf grass, a Maryland couple sued. They ended up changing state law."

"As California faces the prospect of a fourth consecutive dry year, officials with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California have declared a regional drought emergency and called on water agencies to immediately reduce their use of all imported supplies."

"Nomad Tsering Angchuk vows to stay put in his remote village in India’s Ladakh region. His two sons and most of his fellow villagers have migrated to a nearby urban settlement but Angchuk is determined to herd his flock of fine cashmere-producing goats in the treeless Kharnak village, a hauntingly beautiful but unforgiving, cold mountainous desert."

"The last remaining registrations that allow chlorpyrifos to be used on food crops would be canceled under a pair of notices the EPA is proposing, a move that would end food uses of a pesticide the agency says harms children."

"On a mountainside high above Peru’s capital, Javier Obispo pauses from the backbreaking work of renovating an amuna. The abandoned irrigation dike distributed water before Europeans came to South America."

"The owner of Deep Roots Farm in rural Maryland and her workers finished the fall harvest last month, but some of their most vital plantings are still in the ground - and growing fast."

"More than 200,000 Somalis are suffering catastrophic food shortages and many are dying of hunger, with that number set to rise to over 700,000 next year, according to an analysis by an alliance of U.N. agencies and aid groups."

"Like Big Oil, pesticide companies spend hundreds of millions every year on deceitful PR strategies to keep their hazardous products on the market, even as evidence mounts that many pesticides still used today are tied to certain cancers, damage to children’s developing brains, biodiversity collapse, and more."

"In the Horn of Africa, a climate change-induced drought is exposing cracks in the global food system and pushing humanitarian aid to a breaking point."

"For the first time in almost three decades, the Bureau of Land Management is preparing a new rule to guide its management of cows and other livestock grazing on federal lands, a long divisive issue that has only grown more contentious in the West after two decades of drought."