Whenever I have a desire to be outside during the summer months as temperatures in Metro Tucson Arizona rise above 105 F, I select certain shady places where old trees offer me a break from the heat. Some are where old olive trees from north Africa were planted more than a century ago by agroecologist Robert Forbes, the first Dean of Agriculture at the University of Arizona. They are large and spreading, offering enough fruit each year for students to ...

In America’s farm country, the fear is palpable. In recent months, I’ve talked to dairy farm owners in Wisconsin, grain and soy farmers in the Dakotas, and stockmen in California who worry that President Donald Trump’s tariff wars will trigger a new farm crisis. Many predict hard times to rival the epidemic of bankruptcies that devastated American farms in the 1980s.

The tariffs aren’t helping, it’s true. But Trump’s trade dispute is just the latest factor in a longer-term decline ...

You can sip me, you can eat me and you can moisturize with me—what am I? The agave plant.

Today, this plant is widely known as the key ingredient in the alcoholic beverage that is taken with lime and salt or mixed in to make margaritas, but agave has a much greater importance in the Sonoran Desert than just tequila.

“We think about tequila as the major way we know the plant today, but up until a century ago more people ate ...

Something other than coffee is brewing at Exo Roast Co. Along with the typical coffee beverages like lattes, cappuccinos, and chai, Exo Roast Co. also offers something with a little extra kick to it—a chiltepine cold brew.

“It sprung from an interest in using local ingredients,” Doug Smith, co-owner of Exo Roast Co., said.

From the very beginning Smith knew he wanted to incorporate local ingredients into his menu. As someone who likes the sweet, savory combination of chocolate ...

We propose that comparisons of wild and domesticated Capsicum species can serve as a model system for elucidating how crop domestication influences biotic and abiotic interactions mediated by plant chemical defenses. Perhaps no set of secondary metabolites (SMs) used for plant defenses and human health have been better studied in the wild and in milpa agro-habitats than those found in Capsicum species. However, very few scientific studies on SM variation have been conducted in both the domesticated landraces of chile ...

‘Our seeds have basically gone all over the world,’ says Neil Lash, who earns the Source Award for Teacher.

Sometime around 1990, Waldoboro school teacher Neil Lash was watching the PBS program “The Victory Garden” when Kent Whealy appeared on the screen. Whealy had co-founded Seed Savers Exchange, one of the largest non-governmental seed banks in the United States and as he talked about the work they done with heirloom seeds, including some that had been brought to the United States ...