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Unassuming from the road, this farmstead served as the headquarters for a ring of international thieves bent on embezzling U.S. seed. The FBI thwarts a ring of Chinese national thieves. Crouched on his hands and knees under an Iowa sky, Mo Hailong quickly dug in the rows of freshly planted seed corn. Just the day before, May 2, 2011, he and coworker Wang Lei, vice chairman of Kings Nower Seed of China, stopped at this same field near Tama, Iowa. The farmer told them he was planting seed corn. With each shovel, Hailong found pay dirt: DuPont Pioneer’s latest parent...

On the off chance you might encounter people who don't understand why George Soros and Monsanto might want the Ukraine.... The official title of the tsars was "Tsar of all the Russias", meaning primarily 'Great Russia' (Russia), 'White Russia' (Belorus), and 'Little Russia' (Ukraine). That is the heart of the Slavic Orthodox world and Ukraine is the breadbasket of that world. The Ukraine could feed everybody from the Volga to the Atlantic and that in fact was Hitler's plan; the idea was to build a super-gauge train to haul foodstuffs from Ukraine to Europe and, as I read it at...

Now, farmers are discovering that the FDA's proposed rules would curtail many techniques that are common among organic growers, including spreading house-made fertilizers, tilling cropland with grazing animals, and irrigating from open creeks. Suddenly, from small family operations nestled in the foothills of Appalachia to the sophisticated organic-grower networks that serve Los Angeles and San Francisco, the farms that celebrity chefs and food-conscious consumers jostle to buy from are facing an unexpected adversary. They're fighting back. Even though full enforcement of the rules is still years away, they are warning customers that some farms would have to close. "They are...

A potato genetically modified to resist the fungus which caused the devastating Irish potato famine of 1845 has been developed by British scientists. Late blight, caused by the organism Phytophthora infestans, remains the potato farmer’s greatest enemy to this day. Each year UK farmers spend around £60 million keeping the infection at bay with pesticides. In a bad year, losses and control measures combined can account for half the total cost of growing potatoes. …

"Anybody you see around here dressed in a Tyvek suit will be someone from Greenpeace," David Stoltzfus joked as we surveyed the thousands of carefully numbered corn plants growing in the stony rust-colored soil of a former sugar cane plantation just a few miles inland from the spectacular Wailea Beach. Stoltzfus, who heads Monsanto's Piilani seed production farm on Maui, was referring to the white disposable coveralls that protesters wear for the TV cameras when "decontaminating" biotech crop fields. Hawaii is the epicenter of a furious campaign to shut down production farms that yield genetically modified seed. It was September,...

Microsoft is an insanely profitable company standing on the edge of disaster. It desperately needs new thinking. With word that 22-year Microsoft veteran Satya Nadella is likely the new CEO, attention turns to the leadership of the company's board of directors. It will have two former CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. So new thinking is unlikely to come from them. In fact, Gates has a track record of huge strategic errors that have cost the company years of progress in market share. Here's why he should be the one to go: 1. Gates' world was: Go slow. Microsoft needs...

Atheists and agnostics like to claim that religion or belief in God isn’t necessary for living a moral life. “I can be a good person without God,” they say. Some go a step further and try to build a case for why they can be even better people without God. For example, they might claim that whereas theists are concerned about obeying religious commands that will get them into a heavenly afterlife, unbelievers are able to apply all their energies to making this world a better place.In a certain sense, it’s correct to say that one can be a...

Al Gore pops his head up at Davos…say, how’d he get there? A fossil fueled flight?…to make a racist pronouncement (via Climate Depot). Stopping overpopulation is one way the dangers of climate change can be mitigated, according to two of the most prominent believers in global warming. Former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft founder Bill Gates (how did Gates get to Davos? Anyone think he flew commercial?) said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that contraception is a key in controlling the proliferation of unusual weather they say is endangering the world. “Depressing the rate of child mortality,...

Former Vice President Al Gore raised eyebrows last week when he suggested that “fertility management” was the key to fighting global warming and promoting economic development in poor countries. Gore’s comments drew criticism from free-marketeers who said his remarks amount to “eco-imperialism.” “Gore’s agenda for saving the world from global warming has always included population control,” Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Advocating population control specifically for Africa is just another form of imperialism. Gore’s eco-imperialism is uncomfortably close to the original racist goals...

Around the world, obesity levels are rising. More people are now overweight than undernourished. Two thirds of British adults are overweight and one in four of us is classified as obese. In the first of this three-part series, Jacques Peretti traces those responsible for revolutionising our eating habits, to find out how decisions made in America 40 years ago influence the way we eat now. Peretti travels to America to investigate the story of high-fructose corn syrup. The sweetener was championed in the US in the 1970s by Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary Earl Butz to make use of the excess...

General Mills says some Cheerios made without genetically modified ingredients will start appearing on shelves soon. The Minneapolis-based company said Thursday that it has been manufacturing its original-flavor Cheerios without GMOs for the past several weeks in response to consumer demand. It did not specify exactly when those boxes would be on sale. Original Cheerios will now be labeled as “Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients,” although that it is not an official certification. The labels will also note that trace amounts of GMO ingredients could be present due to contamination during the manufacturing process, said Mike Siemienas, a company...

China rejected two shipments -- almost 546,000 tons -- of U.S. dried distillers' grain, a corn byproduct, because it contained genetically modified material, state media reported Friday.

The startup is housed in a garage-like space in San Francisco’s tech-heavy South of Market neighborhood, but it isn’t like most of its neighbors that develop software, websites and mobile phone apps. Its mission is to find plant replacements for eggs. Inside, research chefs bake cookies and cakes, whip up batches of flavored mayonnaise and pan-fry omelets and French toast—all without eggs. Funded by prominent Silicon Valley investors and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Hampton Creek Foods seeks to disrupt a global egg industry that backers say wastes energy, pollutes the environment, causes disease outbreaks and confines chickens to tiny spaces....

Argentine union members on Thursday clashed with environmentalists protesting the construction of a plant by U.S.-based seed giant Monsanto. … Construction of the corn-processing plant was halted in October when environmentalists began disrupting entry of supplies. Activists oppose the use of genetically modified crops, which Monsanto produces and (environmentalist Vanina) Barboza says they’ll continue to block roads and access to the plant. …

Late last year, in a small health-food eatery called Cafe Sprouts in Oberlin, Ohio, I had what may well have been the most wholesome beverage of my life. The friendly server guided me to an apple-blueberry-kale-carrot smoothie-juice combination, which she spent the next several minutes preparing, mostly by shepherding farm-fresh produce into machinery. The result was tasty. But at 300 calories (by my rough calculation) for a 16-ounce cup, it was more than my diet could regularly absorb without consequences. Nor was I about to make a habit of $9 shakes, healthy or not. Inspired by the experience nonetheless, I...

Did you know that the Obama administration is negotiating a super secret “trade agreement” that is so sensitive that he isn’t even allowing members of Congress to see it? The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the “NAFTA of the Pacific” and “NAFTA on steroids”, but the truth is that it is so much more than just a trade agreement. This treaty has 29 chapters, but only 5 of them have to do with trade. Most Americans don’t realize this, but this treaty will fundamentally change our laws regarding Internet freedom, health care, the trading of derivatives, copyright issues, food...

UPDATE, 8:20 p.m.: With 20 counties reporting– including King, Pierce, Spokane and Thurston — the initiative that would label genetically engineered food was trailing 47 percent to 53 percent. More results are coming.

If one believes the backers of Washington State Initiative 522, Tuesday’s vote is simple commonsense: It’s about the “right to know” what’s in our food... “To be clear the Just Label campaign is not an anti-GMO effort,” says Gary Hirshberg, founder of organic food maker Stonyfield Organic, and head of Just Label It... But in less guarded moments, Hirshberg makes it clear that the labeling movement has nothing at all to do with science, information and discourse—it is exclusively an anti-GMO effort...

As a tech-obsessed child growing up in the nineties, Rob Rhinehart was always puzzled by food. Here he was, eagerly embracing the wonders of the information era, and he had to gnaw on seared chunks of meat and raw vegetables. “I remember when I was very young, eating lettuce and thinking it was very weird to be eating leaves, sitting in this nice house with all of these electronics around us,” he says now. These days, Rhinehart doesn’t eat much lettuce or anything else recognizable as food. Instead, the 25-year-old gets most of his nutrition from a water bottle filled...

A 2009 study concluded that golden rice is effectively converted into vitamin A in humans. A 2012 study that fed 68 children ages 6 to 8 concluded that golden rice was as good as vitamin A supplements and better than the natural beta-carotene in spinach. Recently, scientists gathered evidence from Mozambique and Uganda that vitamin A enhanced sweet potatoes are, in fact, improving people's lives. Children who are eating them do have more vitamin A in their blood. Based on other studies of the effects of vitamin A, nutritionistsare confident that the boost is big enough to improve the health...