Each year, in fact, the bee industry supplies at least 1 million queens and packages of bees to replace lost hives, according to a 2006 National Research Council report. Beekeepers, who travel nationwide supplying pollinators to farmers, have been losing honeybees for a long time, mostly a result of suburbs snapping up habitat and the invasion in the 1980s of two foreign parasitic mite species. Daniel Weaver, head of the 1,500-member American Beekeeping Federation, estimates that about...

Yet many ag businesses, farm groups and the federal government put a price on what you eat every day by promoting, lobbying and enacting food standards that do more to ensure their profits and your ignorance than provide public information and public safety. Yet many ag businesses, farm groups and the federal government put a price on what you eat every day by promoting, lobbying and enacting food standards that do more to ensure their profits and your ignorance than provide public...

He insists that farmers in America, whether in the cotton belt or corn or soybean farms, have many options available, and does not believe that the proposed acquisition would change that. Unless people know what products Monsanto has on the grocery store shelf, how will you boycott? The farmers can boycott because they will be buying seeds. FC: Lee Quarles, a Monsanto spokesperson, said that through its work in seed genetics and biotechnology both of which are scale neutral whether a...

Department of Agriculture has been issuing dietary guidelines, there has been a stark inconsistency between the federal government's advice and its food funding. True, the USDA has been doing more, over time, to promote health through dietary guidelines, food pyramids and other nutrition programs. And yet more than $20 billion yearly - more than one-fifth its budget - is sunk into a farm bill that supports many of the foods its recommendations warn against. This legislation began during...

The recent mass removal of tainted and suspect spinach from the market is a reminder of this - and of the need for US agriculture to adopt more appropriate safety measures. Food-safety experts pushing for produce to be as regulated and overseen as meat are probably right, but this direction involves an irony and perhaps an element of faulty reasoning. Moving to meat-like inspections will force even more centralization of food production, because only large producers will be able to afford...