Agriculture

As crop prices rise, Iowa land formerly thought useless for farming is being tilled and planted.

After the earthquake, Haiti's recovery has not been in rebuilding the center city, but through decentralization and the development of farming. But even this plan, reports Randal Archibald, is fraught with challenges.

Faced with climate change and poverty, Africans are focusing on a new farming frontier: the cities.

In the '00s, housing built around golf courses was all the rage. Stephanie Simon reports that today's consumer wants to live next to an organic farm, vineyard or other micro-rural setting.

Jonathan Lerner reports from Fresno, where sprawling development has clashed with agriculture, the region's bread and butter. A new regional plan hopes to preserve farmland and ease tensions.

Deadly algae and invasive species are choking the life out of Lake Erie. It recovered from near-death 40 years ago, but the regulations that helped save it last time are under increasing attack.

Edward Glaeser adds "large-scale metropolitan farming" to a list -- which also includes historic preservation -- of barriers to densifying urban development patterns. His argument is that the latter is the greener of the two.

In this food-focused installment of a series on "great places", Grist's Tom Philpott argues that food system as currently structured creates the opposite of great places.

Census data shows that Lacrosse, WA (pop. 315) and other small, rural towns are getting smaller. Some blame the Conservation Reserve Program. But Lacrosse and many others aren't going quietly - they're fighting to hang on.

Agricultural spaces are increasingly being included in housing developments.

The Global Village Construction Set is a group of farmers and engineers who are developing an set of open-source designs for the forty tools one would need to create a self-sufficient life living off of the land.

A new project is seeking to create the first citywide, comprehensive urban agriculture plan for New York City.

Cities across the developing world are dealing more with rising obesity rates as urbanization occurs, reports TheCityFix's Jonna McKone.

The process of re-designing California's Delta to protect endangered species, feed the state's farms and serve freshwater to its residents has become further complicated.

Arizona's long-standing open range laws allow cattle to roam freely, but the state is now reconsidering the laws as residents of the West's suburban subdivisions are growing more frustrated by encounters with roaming cattle.

A new report from The Los Angeles Food Policy Task Force calls for the government to take steps to increase accessibility to local, healthy food in urban areas.

Cities, not the agriculture heavy Central Valley, are the source of most of the runoff and pollution that enters the San Francisco Bay, according to a new report.

A proposed irrigation project near the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru that would divert water away from small villages has sparked violent protests.

Decommissioned farms and fields in California are being scouted as possible sited for renewable energy production.

Urban agriculture is not a new idea. Grist's Tom Philpott says the renewed interest in the idea should look for good ideas from its past.