Sustainable Agriculture & Food Policy

You may have seen the videos – swirling masses of plastic and other garbage, including drinking straws, floating around the ocean and choking sea creatures who think these items are food. Soon Mainers could have an alternative – a biodegradable “straw straw,” made from stalks of winter rye.

California's sauce tomatoes are never harvested by hand. Meet the machine that changed an industry, practically overnight.

Maine Fare 2015 and the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance will present a Seafood Throwdow. In this Iron Chef-like event, Chefs Michele Levesque of El El Frijoles in Sargentville and Tom Sigler of Comida in Rockland will have an hour to cook a mystery fish; they will each be supplied with a box of local produce and pantry staples, and are allowed to bring three of their favorite ingredients.

In high school, Professor Elizabeth Hoover wanted to be a farmer. Instead, she became an anthropologist who studies the relationships between farming, environmental contamination and food. This story is part of "Learning and Doing" - a series on engaged scholarship at Brown University that tells the stories of faculty and students partnering with the community to advance scholarship and benefit the world beyond Brown.

“The longer the supply chain, the weaker the connection between the farmer’s management information and the ultimate consumer,” said Daniel Mountjoy of Sustainable Conservation, which led a recent tour of [Chris] Willoughby’s fields. Inexact water use data is more of a problem in fragmented supply chains such as Willoughby’s, where each link acts independently and contracts are subject to change. Read more

Kendra Klein, senior program associate for Physicians for Social Responsibility, said her group has been “excited and very hopeful” that the USDA start addressing diet’s influence on the environment — in terms of carbon emissions and in terms of pesticide and land use.

“Many of the leading figures of social entrepreneurship have been affiliated with Yale,” Klein said. “It’s a more recent tradition … but it’s a tradition we are proud of.” Many students hope not only to develop a business but also to do something for the greater good, said Stuart DeCew FES ’11 SOM ’11, program director of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, which runs the Sabin Sustainable Venture.