Agriculture news, articles and features | ��è��Ƶ

Wildlife thrives in solar farm built on restored peatland

Alec Luhn — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:00:11 +0000

A diverse range of bird species has been recorded at a solar park on rewetted peatland in Germany, suggesting that combining energy generation with habitat restoration could benefit biodiversity, the climate and the economy

��è��Ƶ recommends a devastating account of farming honeybees

Thomas Lewton — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Jennie Durant's Bitter Honey is a great exposé of the true cost of industrially farming US honeybees, finds Thomas Lewton. But the book's grim figures of bee death alone may not prompt deep change – how about seeing them as fellow creatures?

Are manure digesters a real solution to dairy farm emissions?

Alec Luhn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:00:04 +0000

Anaerobic digesters converting manure to biogas reduce methane emissions from livestock, but incentives for them have encouraged factory farms to get bigger

Food shock is inevitable due to the Iran war – and it could get bad

Michael Le Page — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:14:53 +0000

Even if the conflict in the Middle East ends today, higher fuel, fertiliser and pesticide prices will lead to a food shock in the coming months. There is no easy way out, but accelerating the net-zero transition will help prevent future shocks

World is entering an era of ‘water bankruptcy’

Alec Luhn — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:00:57 +0000

Drought in Iran has left little water in the Latyan Dam near Tehran

BAHRAM/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Earth has entered an “era of water bankruptcy” due to over-consumption and global warming, with 3 in 4 people living in countries that face water shortages, water contamination or drought.

That’s the conclusion of a that has found most regions are overdrawing their annual income of rainwater and snowmelt and dipping into their savings of groundwater, which can take thousands of years to replenish. Seventy per cent of major aquifers are declining. Many of these changes are irreversible.

Two key drivers are agriculture and cities expanding into arid areas, which are getting even drier due to climate change. have appeared in Turkey due to groundwater pumping, while .

Read more

California’s groundwater drought continues despite torrential rain

“Our checking account, the surface water… is now empty,” says the report’s author, at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “The savings account that we inherited from our ancestors, the groundwater, glaciers and so on … they’re also drained now. We are seeing symptoms around the world … of water bankruptcy.”

About , fuelling migration, conflicts and unrest. Madani, who was formerly deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment, says water shortages contributed to the recent bloody protests there, although a currency collapse was the immediate trigger.

, while a rash of dams and wells for farming have – once the largest lake in the Middle East – and depleted most of the country’s groundwater. The government has mooted evacuating Tehran and is trying to induce rainfall through cloud seeding.

In the US, the flow of the Colorado river, which provides water to much of the West, has decreased by an estimated , due largely to lower precipitation and increased evaporation. But it is also being overly diverted to , all while cities like Los Angeles rely on it for drinking water. As with a rising number of rivers, it no longer reaches the sea.

The river’s two major reservoirs are at about 30 per cent capacity and could reach “dead pool” levels at 10 to 15 per cent of capacity as soon as 2027, according to at Colorado State University. Talks over how much each state would reduce consumption broke down last year.

Increasing agricultural water efficiency has been shown to only increase water use, since drip or sprinkler irrigation allows water to be gradually absorbed by plants, whereas the flooding of fields results in more water running back into the river. So it needs to be coupled with cuts in water consumption, according to Udall.

“The solution is going to have to come from agriculture primarily because they use 70 per cent of the water,” he says. “Ag cutbacks, that’s what we’re talking about, and that’s true worldwide.”

is in areas with declining water storage. But reducing agriculture’s water use will also require economic diversification, since it is the . Most of them are in lower-income countries, which often export food to the service economies of higher-income nations.

“Water plays a major role in economies… because it puts people [in] jobs,” says Madani. “If they lose their jobs, what happens is what you see in Iran today.”

Even in rainy places, more water is being sucked up by data centres or polluted by industry, sewage, fertilisers or manure. Wetlands covering an area the size of the European Union have been lost, mostly due to conversion to agriculture, costing the world an estimated like flood buffering, food production and carbon storage.

In Bangladesh, about half the country has due to sea level rise and saltwater intrusion. Meanwhile, the tap water and the “dead river” in the capital Dhaka have been poisoned by chemicals from the production of fast fashion for sale in Europe and North America.

“Every person knows that the rivers are being polluted because of the garment industry,” says at the University of Oxford. “But they know that stringent regulation, if applied, would… scare away the buyers.”

Is a broken jet stream causing extreme weather that lasts longer?

��è��Ƶs are scrambling to understand how climate change may be interfering with the winds that carry our weather, with potentially catastrophic consequences

In many cases, rivers, lakes, wetlands and aquifers will never return to their previous state. Moreover, , shrinking water supplies to hundreds of millions of people.

Humanity will have to learn to live with less water, according to Madani. With better water management, that’s possible. First, however, most countries need to simply start accounting for their water sources and consumption, starting with water meters in homes, wells and diversion canals.

“You’re thinking about launching a [cloud-seeding] rocket to get water, but you don’t even know how much water you have in your system,” says Madani. “We cannot manage what we do not measure.”

Journal reference:

Water Resources Management

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A leading use for quantum computers might not need them after all

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:00:05 +0000

Understanding a molecule that plays a key role in nitrogen fixing – a chemical process that enables life on Earth – has long been thought of as problem for quantum computers, but now a classical computer may have solved it

The long-overlooked insects that could save our crops

Marta Zaraska — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:00:00 +0000

Hoverflies, often mistaken for bees and wasps, pollinate three quarters of our crops. Now we’re discovering we can train them to be even more efficient

Fewer than half the calories grown on farms now reach our plates

Michael Le Page — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:32:19 +0000

In 2020, the world produced more than enough calories to feed the global population, but only half of those calories reached people’s plates due to rising meat and biofuel production

We are undergoing unprecedented loss of freshwater across the planet

James Dinneen — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 18:00:46 +0000

Water is being depleted at sites around the world

Intensive groundwater pumping, evaporation and melting due to rising global temperatures have shifted a growing amount of freshwater from the continents to the oceans. This threatens water availability for most of the world’s population and adds to sea level rise. at Arizona State University and his colleagues used gravity measurements from satellites to estimate changes in the total amount of water mass stored on the continents. That includes all forms of freshwater, from rivers and underground aquifers to glaciers and ice sheets.

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Geoengineering could save the ice sheets – but only if we start soon

These measurements show there have been alarming declines in freshwater in many parts of the world between 2002 and 2024. The researchers found dry regions aren’t just getting drier – a trend expected with climate change – they are also expanding by more than 800,000 square kilometres per year, an area about the size of the UK and France combined. The team identified four “mega-drying” regions where separate areas of freshwater loss have now connected to create a swathe of drying. Those include northern Canada and Russia, where loss is driven by melting glaciers, permafrost and reduced snow. In the other two regions, water loss is dominated by groundwater depletion, mainly from pumping for irrigation. Those are the US Southwest, much of Central America and a region stretching from western Europe and North Africa to northern India and China. They found groundwater depletion, which can be exacerbated by heat and drought prompting people to pump more, makes up 68 per cent of the decline in overall water storage. This transfer of mass is so large it has become a major contributor to sea level rise. They found since 2015, water loss from the continents has caused more sea level rise than meltwater from the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets, raising the oceans by just under a millimetre per year. These trends together “send perhaps the direst message on the impact of climate change to date”, the researchers write in their report. “The continents are drying, freshwater availability is shrinking, and sea level rise is accelerating.” We already knew about these drying trends in many individual regions, says at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. But he says the power of this research comes from its global view of the problem. “We are not producing water or destroying water. We are just redistributing water. But redistribution is not going in the right direction,” he says. “The next step is really to do the detailed diagnosis to actually separate out what’s driving the groundwater depletion,” says at Columbia University in New York. “It would take a little more detail to separate the climate change story from the groundwater depletion story.”

Journal reference

Science Advances

Why a tech start-up wants to pump your faeces deep underground

James Dinneen — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:00:46 +0000

Start-up Vaulted Deep, which just signed a deal with Microsoft, says storing human waste deep underground can keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and pollutants like forever chemicals out of surface ecosystems

Agriculture news, articles and features | ��è����Ƶ