Articles by Tom Philpott
Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.
All Articles
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Why plowing up Conservation Reserve Program land won’t solve the food crisis
Uh oh. The New York Times reports that “thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate.” Rather then let the ground lie fallow, they’re planting it with corn, soy, and wheat — the price of each of which stands near or above all-time […]
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Global food riots edition
A couple of months ago, I raised the question, can industrial agriculture feed the world? I was being intentionally provocative. For decades, policymakers have treated low-input, diversified agriculture — “organic” in the sense described by the great British agriculture scholar Sir Albert Howard — as a kind of hippy indulgence. Sure, it’s nice to grow […]
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The hog giant CAFOizes Poland and Romania to gain access to Western Europe
Farmers in Iowa and North Carolina — the two states that together house nearly half of U.S. hog production [PDF] — won’t be surprised by this report, from the International Herald Tribune: The American bacon producer, Smithfield Farms, now operates a dozen vast industrial pig farms in Poland. Importing cheap soy feed from South America, […]
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A tasting of seven organic beers
Can’t get enough of that frothy stuff. Photo: iStockphoto Why is beer so good? The question has perplexed humanity since the dawn of agricultural civilization 10,000 years ago. Archeological records show that beer-making evolved with bread-making: both are ways of using fermentation to preserve grain, the first cultivated crop. To make beer, you let grain […]
