Sublime

John Todd, the venerable systems ecologist best known for his work on environmental remediation. In 1969 Todd founded the New Alchemy Institute and began to design microecosystems, self-contained plant communities inside greenhouses. Using them as small-scale prototypes for larger real-world projects, he revolutionized how we approach solving envir

CGIAR isn’t just focused on new seeds. Its scientists have also created a smartphone app that allows farmers to use the camera on their phones to identify specific pests and diseases attacking cassava, an important cash crop in Africa. It’s also created programs for using drones and ground sensors to help farmers determine how much water and fertil

Inner-city abandoned lots could be easily converted to vertical-farm complexes, not only adding much-needed revenue to the city coffers, but also eliminating “food deserts.”

In the 1990s, he was active in promoting living wall gardens, which are vertical planting beds that grow vegetables without pesticides, weeding, or much labor. (Small versions are now sold in cooking supply stores, from companies such as AeroGarden.) Bergmann

None of the people reading this book will relocate to Mars; all of us will continue to eat staple grain crops grown in soil on large expanses of agricultural land, rather than in the skyscrapers imagined by the proponents of so-called urban agriculture; none of us will live in a dematerialized world that has no use for such irreplaceable natural se

major pesticide, as of the summer of 2009.

This 318-acre highly successful commercial greenhouse complex is located in the middle of a barren portion of the Arizona desert. It drills deep into the rock for its water and recycles all of it. The only moisture that leaves the farm is in the form of tomatoes and cucumbers.