New U.S. agroforestry project will pay farmers to expand 'climate-smart' acres

It’s no secret that, although progress has been made, school lunches need help to become more nutritious and sustainable. School officials in San Francisco are partnering with researchers from UC Berkeley's School of Public Health to better school lunch programs and, ultimately, curb child obesity.

Concerned with colony collapse syndrome in honey bees worldwide, scientists, farmers and tech companies teamed up in Australia to create a micro-sensor that collects data on the bee's environment.

Half of U.S. farm workers are Hispanic, but few make it to leadership positions. A historically white non-profit, FFA, is creating equal education programs in California to increase leadership opportunities for minorities in agriculture.

By supporting small-scale female farmers, Groundswell International, an NGO, is diversifying diets and combating food insecurity in countries in West Africa.

In India, many farmers, especially women farmers, have transitioned to organic farming. While it requires a serious set of skills and knowledge, organic farming increases yields and decreases costs by eliminating the need to buy pesticides. The move is both ecological and economical, and the Indian government is trying to spread the solution.

To combat hunger and malnutrition, Digital Green, an N.G.O., is creating and delivering videos about cheap, innovative farming techniques that can substantially increase small farmers' production of staple foods in India, Ghana, and Ethiopia.

Culinary and agricultural education can sometimes take a backseat to the more academic side of high school. But Blue Hill is teaching high school students the importance of healthy cooking and home grown produce through a cooking class that was recently instituted in Manhattan high schools.

Soil in Bangladesh is becoming increasingly saline and infertile due to climate change. Bangladeshi farmers have begun using a saline-tolerant rice seed in order to produce an abundant crop despite salty soil.

The System of Root Intensification (SRI) method resulted in dramatically high yields from one Indian village. The system centers on a "less is more" approach and results in higher yields—without the use of GMOs. The idea has faced barriers in spreading, as scientists are wary of it, even as villagers embrace the empirically successful approach.

In Australia, the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council was formed after a severe drought to bring together federal, state and regional governments and bridge parochial concerns. It was meant to manage the basin as a whole and end overuse and salinization of farm land, leveraging new technologies to adapt to new realities.