soybean Articles
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Biofuel scenarios in a water perspective: The global blue and green water footprint of road transport in 2030
Concerns over energy security and climate change stimulate developments towards renewable energy. Transport is expected to switch from fossil fuel use to the use of fuel mixtures with a larger fraction of biofuels, e.g. bio-ethanol and biodiesel. Growing biomass for biofuels requires water, a scarce resource. Existing scenarios on freshwater use usually consider changes in food and livestock ...
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Rising Meat Consumption Takes Big Bite out of Grain Harvest
http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights22 World consumption of animal protein is everywhere on the rise. Meat consumption increased from 44 million tons in 1950 to 284 million tons in 2009, more than doubling annual consumption per person to over 90 pounds. The rise in consumption of milk and eggs is equally dramatic. Wherever incomes rise, so does meat consumption. As the ...
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Moving Up the Food Chain
For most of the time that human beings have walked the earth, we lived as hunter-gatherers. The share of the human diet that came from hunting versus gathering varied with geographic location, hunting skills, and the season of the year. During the northern hemisphere winter, for instance, when there was little food to gather, people there depended heavily on hunting for survival. Our long history ...
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Rethinking food production for a world of eight billion
The World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointlyannounced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of theyear. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of peoplewere chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only hasChina ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has becomethe world’s third largest food aid donor. The key ...
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Family farms can be competitive by focusing on conservation and stewardship
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports a 40 percent decline in U.S. cropland soil erosion rates from 1982 to 2007, recent trends appear to challenge this progress. Record prices for corn and soybeans have diverted acres out of conservation programs and encouraged intensive production on a wide scale. Tree lines are cleared and wet areas drained, turning 120-acre farms into ...
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Could food shortages bring down civilization?
One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s economic crisis. For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems ...
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