North Carolina Braces for Another Flood of Hog Poop
A hog operation with a lagoon in Sampson County, on North Carolina’s coastal plain.Matt Butler, Sound Rivers/Waterkeeper Alliance/Flicker It’s emerging as an annual rite: A massive hurricane roars across North Carolina and deposits epic amounts of water on the state’s coastal plain, home to a tangle of rivers intertwined with one of the globe’s most…
Jay Inslee Wants to Pay Farmers to Pull Carbon from the Atmosphere
Caroline Brehman/Associated Press True to his fixation on battling climate change, today Washington governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Jay Inslee released a rural policy platform centered on encouraging farmers to pull carbon from the atmosphere and trap it in soil. For decades, United States farm policy has pushed farmers in the nation’s Midwestern states to…
The Secret History of Why Soda Companies Switched From Sugar to High-Fructose Corn Syrup
Lemon_tm/iStock In a mesmerizing recent article, Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy recounts the surprising backstory of one of corporate marketing’s greatest flops: Coca-Cola’s quickly aborted 1985 effort to tweak its formula and convince consumers to accept “New Coke.” Tim Murphy is on this week’s episode of Bite, talking about New Coke and doing a blind taste-test:…
Trump Stings Honeybees While They’re Down
DanielPrudek/iStock/Getty Bees are in a world of trouble right now. A few years ago, the US Environmental Protection Agency took some steps to protect the insects by limiting the use of an insecticide called sulfoxaflor. Made by Corteva, the agricultural arm of DowDupont, sulfoxaflor is “highly toxic to bees and other pollinating insects,” and it also…