Sustainable Agriculture & Food Policy

Beal’s project was funded at $200,000 and builds on his award-winning soft-shell clam research. “Using Applied Research to Support Development of Intertidal Aquaculture of Soft-Shell Clams” focuses on wild clam recruitment in the Harraseeket River system at Freeport. Read more

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Beal and a team based at the university’s Marine Science Field Station at the Downeast Institute are putting their aquaculture innovation skills to work. The team’s goals are to diversify the U.S. market for shellfish and increase the number of jobs in that market. The researchers are focused on two types of shellfish with the potential to bring more jobs and dollars to the area: blue mussels and Arctic surfclams.

The air in San Sebastián Tepalcatepec, a farming community in the south-central Mexican state of Puebla, is hot and dry and, frankly, reeks. Alexander Eaton rolls down the window of his pickup truck and inhales. “This smells like opportunity,” he tells Quartz with a grin.

On a drought-parched piece of land in California's Central Valley, farmer Don Cameron has persuaded other growers to do something counterintuitive. Flood their farms. "I think you could put millions of acre feet back into the ground," said Cameron, who grows everything from almonds and grapes to carrots and tomatoes.

Heather Coleman spoke at the the NASA Climate Policy Speaker Series on Oxfam's global work and COP21. Visit the NASA website

Chris Bacon and his colleagues have received a $300,000 mult-year National Science Foundation research grant to study food and water security under climate change for smallholders in Nicaragua.

For many U.S. veterans, finding fulfilling employment and acclimating back into civilian life can be just as taxing as military service itself. At the same time, America is facing a shortage of farmers, with almost 30% of growers over the age of 65, and fewer than 10% under the age of 35. The Heroic Food Farm is an initiative by Heroic Food and Ennead Architects/Ennead Lab, in collaboration with RAFT Landscape Architecture, to guide returning soldiers from "barracks to barns," with a new mission of battling the nation's farming crisis.

It’s no secret that urban farms and gardens are core to Portland’s identity as one of the most sustainable cities in the world. What’s maybe lesser known is that those young patches of kale and cabbage are often entangled in processes of gentrification and displacement.

Until 1982, there was a law on the books – the 1902 Reclamation Act – that limited the size of farms allowed to use government-subsidized irrigation water across the western U.S. to just 160 acres. That’s much, much smaller than the kind of massive-scale agricultural development that characterizes California farming in general and the Valley in particular. What may sound to modern readers like a quaint rule was actually meant to be an important safeguard against consolidation of land, power and wealth in the developing West.