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	<title>Science &#38; SpaceCategory: Agriculture &#124; Science &#38; Space &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>Science &#38; SpaceCategory: Agriculture &#124; Science &#38; Space &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>As Crop Prices Rise, Farmland Expands—and the Environment Suffers</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/02/20/as-crop-prices-rise-farmland-expands-and-the-environment-suffers/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2013/02/20/as-crop-prices-rise-farmland-expands-and-the-environment-suffers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:00:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Agriculture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[agriculture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cropland]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[farming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grassland. habitat]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=13517</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[American farmers, as the recent Super Bowl ad showed, are just simple, hard-working folk, scratching a living from the land. Right? Except for the hard-working part, don&#8217;t believe it. Farmers are capitalists, just as much as their cousins in the big city. Case in point: as the price of crops like corn and soybeans has risen considerably in recent years—thanks to increased demand, both for food and as feedstocks for biofuel—farmers have been planting more of them. Supply and demand–it&#8217;s Econ 101 at its purest. (With the exception of the billions upon billions of dollars worth of market-distorting subsidies that are part of the agriculture sector. But that&#8217;s grist for another post.) If a farmer wants to increase the amount of grain they produce, he really only has a couple of options. He can try to squeeze more crop out of the land he&#8217;s already farming, which is something American farmers have been pretty good at. (Corn yields per acre have increased by more than two and a half times since 1960.) Or he can expand the amount of land that he&#8217;s farming, by converting or buying non-farmed land and putting it into cultivation. Land, after all, is the raw material of agriculture, like steel and rubber are the raw materials of a car. More land means more crops. Add in the fact that funding has been declining for the government&#8217;s Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to protect wildlife by keeping land uncultivated. (MORE: Desert Dreams: Can the Middle Eastern Country of Qatar Learn to Feed Itself?) According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that&#8217;s exactly what&#8217;s happened to the western end of the great U.S. corn belt. Researchers from South Dakota State University crunched the numbers and found that 1.3 million acres of grassland in disappeared between 2006 and 2011 in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota. The grassland was converted to cropland, as farmers expanded their territory in an effort to cash in—and I mean that in a totally<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=13517&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Agriculture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/agriculture-2/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/82274592.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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		<title>Why the New Ken Burns Documentary on the Dust Bowl Has Lessons to Teach Us</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2012/11/18/why-the-new-ken-burns-documentary-on-the-dust-bowl-has-lessons-to-teach-us/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2012/11/18/why-the-new-ken-burns-documentary-on-the-dust-bowl-has-lessons-to-teach-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 01:03:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bryan Walsh</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Agriculture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ecocentric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[agriculture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[drought]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Dust Bowl]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://science.time.com/?p=11789</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Climate change and the environment were the forgotten issues of the 2012 election—at least, before Superstorm Sandy put them square on the map. But even before that hurricane slashed through the Northeast, killing more than a hundred people and causing likely more than $50 billion in damages, the U.S. was already in the grips of a slow-motion ecological disaster. 2012 saw one of the biggest and most severe droughts in American history, with the Corn Belt in particular gripped by withering heat and aridity. Yields of corn and soybeans—the staple crops of the U.S. food system—shriveled, leading to higher food prices and a hit to the U.S. economy that could be as much as 1% of GDP. But while the 2012 drought may have been the worst in a half-century, it has nothing on the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s. That decade-long drought—exacerbated by poor farming techniques that left topsoil crumbling in the wind—changed the face of the U.S. and led to massive migrations out of farming states in the Midwest. As the master filmmaker Ken Burns shows in his new documentary The Dust Bowl—airing on PBS Sunday night and Monday night—it&#8217;s a man-made disaster that still has lessons for us today. (The 4-hour documentary will also be available as a DVD-check it out here.) &#8220;The Dust Bowl has never gotten the attention it deserves,&#8221; says Burns. &#8220;But we can see today with this year&#8217;s drought, or with climate change, that we can affect the environment, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.&#8221; The Dust Bowl is vintage Burns, with the documentarian mixing archival photographs and footage with interviews of elderly Dust Bowl survivors. What stands out is that while the 1930s certainly saw a number of severely dry years, the sheer scale of the Dust Bowl had much more to do with farmer&#8217;s practices than with the weather, as well as the financial catastrophe of the Depression, which reduced demand for crops—all after farmers had spent the previous decade and half plowing more and more land. The<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=11789&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Ecocentric</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://science.time.com/category/ecocentric/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/3316822.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Overfarming</media:title>
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