"Indonesia's highest Islamic council has issued a fatwa on burning land and forests, a government official said on Wednesday, in an effort to halt the toxic smog that blankets the region each year."
"Monsanto has accepted a takeover offer from Germany's Bayer at $128 a share, the BBC has learned."
"The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show."
"A federal court on Friday faulted U.S. EPA for releasing hundreds of pages of documents containing personal information of owners of livestock operations."
The Congressional Research Service produces expert nonpartisan backgrounders on many subjects of interest to environment and energy journalists. But Congress won't release them. Thanks to the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, you can read them now.
"Many of California’s farmers, facing severe water cutbacks yet again this year, are blaming the hand they’ve been dealt on environmental protections for endangered fish. The protections limit how much water can be taken up by the huge pumps that serve much of the state."
"The unique mix of microbes in soil has a profound effect on which plants thrive and which ones die".
"The Netherlands, home to windmills and clogs, legalized prostitution and marijuana, is also home to intensively farmed cropland. Holland’s small size and large population have meant that the country his historically needed savvy agriculturalists to feed its people. But as it grows less and less of its own food, the government has to buy out farmers to return cropland to a wilder state.
"The folks who write POLITICO’S Agriculture Tip Sheet were celebrating an anniversary Tuesday. Not their own, but the one-year anniversary of USDA’s proposed organic aquaculture standards being hung up in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) at the White House."
"A pollutant that has leached into California aquifers since farmers first began using synthetic fertilizer continues to accumulate and would not be removed from groundwater even if the state’s agriculture businesses abruptly quit using nitrogen-based materials to boost the productivity of their crops."
"Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, INPE, registered over 53,000 forest fires in the country up to Friday, and warns that the hot, dry weather may make things worse, if law enforcement efforts are not increased."
