While I'm often left paralyzed by apple choice in Kroger, I know the breadth of options at grocery stores mask a far different reality: we've lost roughly 90% of the world's crop varieties in the past 100 years. This threat to future food security is referred to as genetic erosion and primarily attributed to the
The imposing structure of the Svalbard seed bank is familiar to many. This “doomsday†vault (ahem, already breached by climate change) is humanity's last resort for preserving the seeds of our crops and plants. But how did this bastion of biodiversity arise? Nikolai Vavilov, a 20th century Russian agronomist and geneticist, established the first modern
On April 26, 1986, in the city of Pripyat, Ukraine, a group of engineers working on the No. 4 Reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accidentally caused one of the greatest environmental disasters known to mankind. 50 tons of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere and dozens of lives were lost. Pripyat was
When confronted with the imprecise notion of “sustainability†in agriculture, most people's thoughts drift to ideas of ecologically-mindful land management practices. I'll dub these concepts “the classicsâ€: rotate your crops, use less fertilizer and pesticides, always employ cover cropping. While these ideas are not wrong, they are incomplete in that they tend to omit some
