The Back 40

A private-public partnership is working to bring biofuels to the airline industry. Called “Farm to Fly,” the 2-year-old initiative is based on a partnership between the USDA and Boeing. If all goes well, the partners believe that the development of aviation biofuel in the United States has a huge upside that could increase domestic energy security, establish [...]

Beverly Bell and Tory Field recently wrote an interesting piece for the Huffington Post about the global food market and the impact it has on producers and consumers at the local level. They write that food is a great unifier for the world’s citizens, but control of food production and distribution is increasingly being taken [...]

Many people think that billboard advertising ruins beautiful landscapes, but, surely, this is one billboard that anyone would support. A Chilean advertising agency, Mayo draftCFB teamed up with the University of Engineering and Technology to design a billboard, located in Lima, Peru, that captures humidity, filters it, and turns it into potable water, which can [...]

In a recent study, researchers from South Dakota State University have documented a sodbusting trend in the Central Plains states. Due largely to rising commodity prices, the Western Corn Belt has lost  1.3 million acres of grassland over the past 5 years, which is a rate that hasn’t been seen since the 1930′s. The authors found [...]

The United States has been experiencing an anti-meat movement as of late. Critics have deemed meat to be a contributor to obesity, illness, and negative environmental impacts. However, as the article below points out, rarely do we hear about the meat producers across the nation who care deeply about their animals, products, and the effects [...]

In the midst of severe drought, farmers and ranchers especially rely on a decent snowpack for irrigation, but, unfortunately, the recent blizzards that have hit the U.S. have not translated to long-term snow accumulation. In fact, the study, cited in the article below, found that, even though the number of severe snowstorms have increased during [...]