This archive tracks meaningful progress in agriculture — from soil restoration and water-smart farming to policies that support small-scale growers and Indigenous food systems. Each story highlights real advances that are improving how the world grows, shares, and thinks about food.
Mexico will gradually phase out use of the herbicide glyphosate by the time the current administration ends in late 2024, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Wednesday, following a ministerial spat over the product.
Around 1.75 million off-grid solar pumps shall be set up while 1 million operational grid-connected irrigation pumps shall be fitted with solar panels.
French company Agripolis is opening a 150,000-square-foot urban farm in Paris, where it will grow more than 2,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables every day during high season.
Promoters have long extolled the virtue of the grassy weed as one of the cheapest and most important crops for solving the world’s problems around sustainability and health with it’s alleged ability to treat numerous symptoms and diseases.
India’s north-eastern state of Sikkim has won the award for the being the “100 per cent organic state” that promotes agroecological and sustainable food systems.
Hawaii governor David Ige signed a bill banning the use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which has been linked to increased risk of learning disabilities, lower IQs, developmental delays, and behavior problems in children.
EU countries voted on Friday for a near-total ban on insecticides blamed for killing off bee populations, in what campaigners called a “beacon of hope” for the winged insects.
The Haber-Bosch process began with a modest drip of ammonia in a German lab in 1909, when chemist Fritz Haber pulled nitrogen from thin air using pressure, heat, and an iron catalyst. Scaled up by engineer Carl Bosch, it now helps feed roughly half the people alive today.
John Deere’s steel plow, built in 1837, cracked open one of American farming’s most stubborn problems: the sticky Illinois clay that clogged every cast-iron blade. A Vermont blacksmith working in Grand Detour, Deere polished steel until the soil slid right off. By 1855, his Moline factory was selling over 10,000 plows a year.
The cotton gin traces back to 5th-century India, where paintings in the Ajanta Caves show the earliest known depiction of a single roller pressed against stone to separate fiber from seed. Contemporary records later noted one man and one woman could clean 28 pounds of cotton a day using an Indian roller gin — a quiet foundation for a technology that would travel across centuries and continents.
