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10 Reasons to Buy Local Fruit and Veggies - from the University of Vermont

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10 Reasons to Buy Local Fruit and Veggies - from the University of Vermont

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Vermont has a wide variety of farms. While known for our dairy production, there also many farms that raise fruits and vegetables, flowers and herbs, and animal products of all kinds. Our farmers are dedicated to stewardship and committed to quality. And while they love what they do, they aren't doing it for entertainment.

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Adirondack Farmers Market - A list of Farmers Markets in our area!

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Adirondack Farmers Market - A list of Farmers Markets in our area!

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Why join the Adirondack Farmers' Market Cooperative?
We are a non-profit producer-owned agricultural cooperative with markets and members throughout the North County of New York.
One membership fee ($35) gives you reduced rates for both season and day vendor space at all of our markets.

Joining the AFMC offers these additional benefits:

Post your business details, photos, videos, website and social media links on our website

Add your voice and vote in the operation of the Adirondack Farmers' Market Cooperative

Get coverage of your Farmers' Market site with General Liability Insurance

Accept Farmers' Market nutrition program coupons for WIC recipients and Senior citizens (open to eligible farmers), and to accept EBT Cards at participating markets

Set up and sell at other craft shows and events under our tent

Keep connected with Cornell Cooperative Extension offices

Receive membership in "Adirondack Harvest," a program to promote local farms

Receive membership in the Federation of Farmers' Markets of NY, including an opportunity to purchase product liability insurance

Buy products from other vendors and resell them at AFMC market (up to 30% of market display)

Join together with other members to share booth space

Applications are available for the 2018 season!

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We are a non-profit producer-owned agricultural cooperative with markets and members throughout the North County of New York. One membership fee ($35) gives you reduced rates for both season and day vendor space at all of our markets.

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Just Like Cookies...Lettuce Has a Recipe Too! What are the ingredients?

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Just Like Cookies...Lettuce Has a Recipe Too! What are the ingredients?

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During World War I, a severe food crisis emerged in Europe as agricultural workers were recruited into military service and farms were transformed into battlefields. As a result, the burden of feeding millions of starving people fell to the United States. In March of 1917¬-just weeks before the United States entered the war-Charles Lathrop Pack organized the National War Garden Commission to encourage Americans to contribute to the war effort by planting, fertilizing, harvesting and storing their own fruits and vegetables so that more food could be exported to our allies. Citizens were urged to utilize all idle land that was not already engaged in agricultural production-including school and company grounds, parks, backyards or any available vacant lots.

Promoted through propaganda posters advocating that civilians "Sow the seeds of victory" by planting their own vegetables, the war garden movement (as it was originally known) was spread by word of mouth through numerous women's clubs, civic associations and chambers of commerce, which actively encouraged participation in the campaign. Amateur gardeners were provided with instruction pamphlets on how, when and where to sow, and were offered suggestions as to the best crops to plant, along with tips on preventing disease and insect infestations. The endeavor was so well received that the government turned its attention to distributing canning and drying manuals to help people preserve their surplus crops. In addition to the appeal to men and women, the federal Bureau of Education initiated a U.S. School Garden Army (USSGA) to mobilize children to enlist as "soldiers of the soil." As a result of these combined efforts, 3 million new garden plots were planted in 1917 and more than 5.2 million were cultivated in 1918, which generated an estimated 1.45 million quarts of canned fruits and vegetables. By the end of World War I, the campaign promoting home gardens-which by then were referred to as "victory gardens"-had dropped off, but many people continued to maintain them.

Shortly after the United States was drawn into the Second World War, victory gardens began to reemerge. Once again, commercial crops were diverted to the military overseas while transportation was redirected towards moving troops and munitions instead of food. With the introduction of food rationing in the United States in the spring of 1942, Americans had an even greater incentive to grow their own fruits and vegetables in whichever locations they could find: small flower boxes, apartment rooftops, backyards or deserted lots of any size. Amid protests from the Department of Agriculture, Eleanor Roosevelt even planted a victory garden on the White House lawn.

Some of the most popular produce grown included beans, beets, cabbage, carrots, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, peas, tomatoes, turnips, squash and Swiss chard. Through the distribution of several million government-sponsored pamphlets, fledgling farmers were advised to maximize their garden's productivity by practicing succession planting, and were encouraged to record the germination rates of seeds, along with any diseases or insects they may have encountered, in order to minimize waste and improve their garden's output the following year.

Throughout both world wars, the Victory Garden campaign served as a successful means of boosting morale, expressing patriotism, safeguarding against food shortages on the home front, and easing the burden on the commercial farmers working arduously to feed troops and civilians overseas. In 1942, roughly 15 million families planted victory gardens; by 1944, an estimated 20 million victory gardens produced roughly 8 million tons of food-which was the equivalent of more than 40 percent of all the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States. Although the government's promotion of victory gardens ended with the war, a renaissance movement has sprouted up in recent years in support of self-sufficiency and eating seasonally to improve health through local, organic farming and sustainable agriculture.

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During World War I, a severe food crisis emerged in Europe as agricultural workers were recruited into military service and farms were transformed into battlefields. As a result, the burden of feeding millions of starving people fell to the United States.

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Many Americans are familiar with the idea of the Second World War encouraging home 'Victory Gardens'. These have been referenced in many films, documentaries, novels, and WWII memorabilia. This week I learned there was quite a bit of encouragement and participation in 'Victory Gardens' during the First World War. Victory Gardens appeared early on in the war, but several governmental approved pamphlets were published by the National War Garden Commission in 1919. These brief informative writings detailed the importance and means of starting Victory Gardens and then preserving the harvested goods.

Even though the armistice was concluded in November of 1918, the United States government was still encouraging participation in starting and maintaining Victory Gardens to aid in production of food. More Victory Gardens enabled the prices of fruits and vegetables to stay at moderate levels and more produce could be sent to troops still overseas and as war relief for devastated Europe. Not only civilians but also the military camps and bases in the U.S., assigned plots for agricultural production. After growing the produce, the participants were urged to can and preserve the foodstuffs. Printed guides were also sent out to inform the public on the best and most efficient ways to preserve various types of products.

The Special Collections has two of these World War I Victory Garden pamphlets, War Gardening and Home Storage of Vegetables and Home Canning & Drying of Vegetables & Fruits both published in 1919. These two booklets are the "Victory Edition" and on one cover the propaganda slogan "The Kaiser IS canned-can food" is visible. The pamphlets include information on the most productive garden organization, tools and tips, prevention of insects and disease, a schedule for when to plant certain seeds, and how to store specific harvested crops in different areas and save seeds for the next year's garden.

This entry was posted in Collections, History and tagged Books, collections, garden, Great War, history, propaganda, victory, World War I, World War One, WWI. Bookmark the permalink.

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Many Americans are familiar with the idea of the Second World War encouraging home 'Victory Gardens'. These have been referenced in many films, documentaries, novels, and WWII memorabilia. This week I learned there was quite a bit of encouragement and...

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During World War I and World War II, gardening took on a distinctly martial air. Citizens were encouraged to grow their own backyard produce (dubbed "war gardens" in WWI and "victory gardens" in WWII, which shows how far the art of positive spin had progressed in just a few decades). At the same time, food rationing was in effect domestically to support overseas troops - "An army marches on its stomach," goes the quote by Napoleon Bonaparte - and citizens were encouraged to think carefully about food waste and watching what they ate.

"It gave everyone a sense of contributing to the war effort, sometimes in the most minuscule ways," says Dr. Paul Ruffin, Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University, who has written about victory gardens. "If they could grow a few vegetables, even just to feed their family, that meant they weren't taking away from national resources. And in many cases, they would grow a sufficient quantity of vegetables they could contribute directly to the war effort."

Culled from the Library of Congress, some of our favorite food posters from that era. Start a garden and salute.

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12 Fantastic Victory Garden Posters - Modern Farmer

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During World War I and World War II, gardening took on a distinctly martial air. Citizens were encouraged to grow their own backyard produce (dubbed "war gardens" in WWI and "victory gardens" in WWII, which shows how far the art of positive spin had progressed in just a few decades).

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The Big Idea: Vertical Farming and Hydroponics

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The Big Idea: Vertical Farming and Hydroponics

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The Big Idea: Hydroponic and Vertical Farming

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Program Overview/Benefits

Tomatosphere™ has evolved into a regular component of the science curriculum in schools, engaging more than 3 million students across the United States and Canada since its inception in 2001.

Tomatosphere™ is currently supported by a consortium of supporters, with First the Seed Foundation leading the implementation of the program in the United States.

What Is Tomatosphere™?

Tomatosphere™ uses the excitement of space exploration to teach the skills and processes of scientific experimentation and inquiry. Students investigate the effects of the space environment on the growth of food that will inevitably support long-term human space travel.

These space-faring seeds will be distributed in 2017. The seeds were launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on board SpaceX's Dragon on July 18, 2016 and docked with the ISS two days later.

First the Seed Foundation and the Centre for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), will be working together to send Heinzseed tomato seeds to the ISS and bringing them back to Earth for classroom use. New initiatives in tracking, germinating and growing tomatoes on the ISS will further enhance the Tomatosphere™ experience over the next few years.

What does the program involve?

Each classroom is sent two packages of tomato seeds. One package contains seeds that have been sent into space and the other package contains "control" seeds, which have been kept on Earth. Through the Tomatosphere™ project, students will learn how to conduct a scientific experiment and compare the germination rates of the two groups of seeds. Tomatosphere™ relies on a "blind test" in which educators and students will not know which of the two packages are the "space" seeds and which are control seeds until the germination process is complete and results have been submitted.

Watching these seeds germinate and grow will encourage classroom dialogue about the elements of life that support the requirements for space missions - food, water, oxygen and the need to consume carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts. Travelling to and from Mars could take more than two years, therefore it is vital to know how to grow food while astronauts make the journey to the Red Planet, spend time on Mars and make the return journey back to Earth.

The results from your Tomatosphere™ science experiments will help scientists understand some of the issues related to long-term space travel. It's an out-of-this-world opportunity for your students!

Why grow tomatoes in space?

Tomatoes are practical and valuable plants for space applications. They provide wholesome nourishment, as well as purified water through evaporation from their leaves.

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Tomatosphere Program Overview - First the Seed Foundation

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Tomatosphere™ has evolved into a regular component of the science curriculum in schools, engaging more than 3 million students across the United States and Canada since its inception in 2001. Tomatosphere™ is currently supported by a consortium of supporters, with First the Seed Foundation leading the implementation of the program in the United States.

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Veggies in Space: Astronauts Sample Freshly Grown Lettuce

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The astronauts used extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dress the leaves, which had first been cleaned with sanitizing wipes.

It was a long path from farm to table: The romaine seeds had been on the station for 15 months before being activated.

Finally, the astronauts were able to taste.

The verdict:

"That's awesome," Mr. Lindgren said.

"Kind of like arugula," said another space farmer, the astronaut Scott Kelly.

After the snack, Mr. Lindgren told mission control that, as an astronaut, he saw a psychological benefit to growing a living crop aboard a space station, where the view often consists of white and aluminum.

Dr. Gioia Massa, the NASA payload scientist for the veggie experiment, said that the benefits of fresh produce for space travelers were clear.

"The farther and longer humans go away from Earth, the greater the need to be able to grow plants for food, atmosphere recycling and psychological benefits," she said in a statement on Monday.

Plant harvesting in space is a solitary life, but sometimes social media helps. Back on Earth, supporters sent the astronauts messages of solidarity.

I'm going to ROMAINE seated and watch #NASAVEGGIE with a #spacesalad of my own! #ScienceSelfie @NASA pic.twitter.com/4Q22VnjOZk
- Lucas Mennetti (@Lucasmennetti) Aug. 10, 2015

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national aeronautics and space administration

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Growing Vegetables in Space, NASA Astronauts Tweet Their Lunch

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The astronauts used extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dress the leaves, which had first been cleaned with sanitizing wipes. It was a long path from farm to table: The romaine seeds had been on the station for 15 months before being activated. Finally, the astronauts were able to taste.

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Food that is out of this world...literally!

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Food that is out of this world...literally!

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Newsela | Growing food that's out of this world, literally

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Even with advances, food in space remains a work in progress.

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The crew aboard the International Space Station have grown two batches of mixed greens (mizuna, red romaine lettuce and tokyo bekana cabbage), and are now running two Veggie facilities simultaneously.

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How does your space garden grow? Veggie plants harvest, Advanced Plant Habitat installed on International Space Station.

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Veggie Plant Growing System on the International Space Station

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Veggie Plant Growing System on the International Space Station

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Veggie Activated to Grow Fresh Plants on Space Station

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The Veggie plant growth system was activated by Expedition 39 flight engineer Steve Swanson in the Columbus module on the International Space Station.

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Copyright 2020 The Edible Schoolyard Project. All rights reserved.

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Growing Minds trains individuals to establish farm to school gardens and to integrate gardening into state and national curriculum. We emphasize how to sustain a garden program by involving community partners, such as parents, farmers, college students, and agricultural professionals.

Students will eat what they grow! School gardens are an excellent tool for experiential learning and nutrition education. Check out the resources below to create or expand your garden program.

What you can do

School Garden Resources

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Growing Minds trains individuals to establish farm to school gardens and to integrate gardening into state and national curriculum. We emphasize how to sustain a garden program by involving community partners, such as parents, farmers, college students, and agricultural professionals. Students [...]

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Create & Sustain a Program- Nutrition Education in the Garden

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Nutrition education may not be the focus of the standardized tests given in schools, but with rising health issues related to a society with poor eating habits, educators recognize that school is an important place to teach kids about maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

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The questions and resources below are meant to help you explore the myriad considerations that arise when planning a school garden program. As you work through the prompts, you will be encouraged to think about how you want the gardens to be used; what types and how much food you hope to produce; where to locate the gardens; how to design the gardens; what tools and materials you'll need; how much funding and staff support the garden program will require; and what you'll do with the harvest.
Note: These questions and resources focus on the logistics of establishing and maintaining a gardening program. See the education and curriculum topic for more on how to fully integrate gardens into academic programs. See the food safety topic for more on how to keep your garden environment, and harvest, safe.
Background and Progress to Date

Norristown Area School District, PA

What steps have already been taken to plan, create, or expand a garden program at your school or in your district? How many of your district's schools currently have gardens, and how many would like to have a garden?

Are administrators, parents, food service and maintenance staff, teachers, and students invested in the idea of a new or expanded school gardening program? If not, how will you get their buy-in and the practical support you need from them?

For example: You might consider asking a neighboring district with a thriving garden program to offer a tour of their gardens and discuss the benefits.

TIP! At the beginning, it may seem like there's an endless list of considerations that must be thought through before you even break ground on your first garden. Remember, though, that you can start small and grow your program year by year; this approach may even allow you to develop gardens that best suit the needs of your schools.

How many gardens would your program ideally support, and how large would they be? What is your timeline for installing these gardens?

TIP! If you haven't already, consider conducting an audit to determine which schools in your districts have gardens, which schools want them, when they want them, and how they'd like to use them.

What are your goals for your school gardening program? How will the gardens be used and by whom? How many students will learn or work in the gardens, and what are their grade levels? What topics do you want to teach in the garden, and what experiences do you want students to have? How much food are you hoping your gardens will produce?

TIP! End-use questions are essential to consider when deciding where to site and how to design gardens; everything else will flow out of the educational, food-production, and other goals you establish for your program.

Where will you situate any new gardens to ensure that they get adequate light and are close to water sources? Do the soil qualities differ across the school campuses? What other considerations will you take into account when choosing where to plant gardens?

For example: Some schools prioritize visibility to the community when choosing where to plant gardens. If neighbors, parents, and others can see school gardens from the street, they might be more likely to take an interest in them.

Layout, soil, and garden beds

What will your gardens look like? Will different gardens or different parts of one garden cater to different age groups or purposes?

Will you plant seeds or starts directly in the ground, use raised beds, or do some combination of both?

Will you use existing soil or bring soil in from elsewhere? How will you enrich your soil and keep it healthy? Do you plan to use compost, plant cover crops, add fertilizers?

How long is the growing season in your area, and what crops grow well in your soils and climate? Will you involve students in your decision about what crops to plant? Are there any special cultural foods or food traditions that you want to represent in your gardens? Do you plan to plant any fruit-bearing trees?

Which non-food crops will you raise?

For example: Many schools grow non-edible plants or flowers to deter pests, attract pollinators, or simply to make the garden colorful!

Will you raise any bees or animals as part of your gardening program?

Greenhouses, hoop houses, and other structures and spaces

Do you plan to incorporate greenhouses, hoop houses, or any other types of structures into your school gardens? If so, for what purpose?

What other considerations are important in the design of your garden? Will you have a special area for compost? How about a shady area for students to sit while they are participating in lessons or receiving garden training?

What supplies will you need for seeding, planting, harvesting, and teaching in the gardens? Where will you store these items once you've obtained them?

TIP! Don't forget to think about what types of instructional tools (like magnifying glasses, clipboards, or butterfly nets) might be needed for your gardening program.

How much will it cost to maintain your school gardening program throughout the year (including staff time, tools, water, compost, etc.)? Where will this money or in-kind support come from?

For example: Some schools or districts ask for donations of seeds, tools, and other supplies from local nurseries, lumber yards, and home improvement stores. Others send wish lists home to parents asking for their donations of used tools, or even financial support.

TIP! Remember, you can use funds from the nonprofit school food service account to purchase supplies, including seeds, fertilizer, tools, etc for your gardens. If you sell produce, the benefits must accrue back to the nonprofit food service account.

Maintenance, Staffing, & Training

What sort of ongoing maintenance (such as weeding, watering, fertilizing, etc.) will the garden require, both during the school year and the summer? Who will be responsible for these duties? Will you organize regular garden workdays? Solicit the help of volunteers and parents?

What training will teachers, volunteers, students, maintenance stuff, and others need to keep the garden healthy, avoid injury, and ensure that the foods it produces are safe?

For example: Everyone working in the garden will probably need basic safety training. Those watering, harvesting or planting crops will probably need more in depth skills-based training.

How much produce do you anticipate harvesting each season, and what do you intend to do with the harvest? Will you serve some of the garden produce through school cafeterias? Will you offer foods for students to sample right there in the garden or back at the classroom? Do you intend to sell any garden produce through, say, a farmers' market or a community supported agriculture program?

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The questions and resources below are meant to help you explore the myriad considerations that arise when planning a school garden program.

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Credit: Back to school photo via Shutterstock

Involving children in a school gardening program may do more than cultivate a green thumb. It may also cultivate a greater interest in trying new foods, a new study suggests.

Australian researchers found that elementary school children had an increased willingness to try new foods after they had grown and cooked them in a school-based kitchen and gardening program.

"A combined cooking and gardening program can have a dramatic impact on children's attitudes to food in a relatively short space of time," said study author Lisa Gibbs, Ph.D., an associate director at the Jack Brockhoff Child Health and Wellbeing Program at the University of Melbourne.

The study is published today (March 7) in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.

Researchers compared six schools with a kitchen garden program to six schools that had schoolyard gardens but lacked a structured program. They collected data from 764 children ages 8 to 12 and 562 parents at the 12 schools, and evaluated the program's impact over a two-and-a-half year period.

Tasting new foods

Children participating in the program spent at least 45 minutes a week in the garden with a garden specialist. They grew a wide range of fresh herbs, such as coriander and chives; vegetables such as fava beans and Swiss chard; and fruits, including strawberries and peaches, Gibbs said.

Kids also spent 90 minutes a week in the kitchen with a cooking specialist making lunches that used the fresh herbs and produce. The children prepared, cooked and shared new foods with their classmates weekly, said Gibbs. During these lunches, which featured dishes ranging from pasta and salads to curries and handmade pastries, children were encouraged to taste the foods, but they were under no pressure to eat them.

Traditional subjects were blended into the curriculum so children would measure plants and track their growth as part of their math lessons; write about their time in the garden for an English assignment; or learn to identify plants in science class.

Surveys completed at the end of the kitchen garden program found that kids in the program group were twice as willing to try new foods as children who did not participate in a structured program. Parent questionnaires had similar results.

At the beginning of the study, parents in schools with the kitchen garden program reported that nearly 39 percent of children were willing to try a new food if they had cooked it, but this number had jumped to 51 percent by the end of the program. By contrast, 32 percent of parents at schools without the formal program said their child would sample a new food if their child had cooked it; at follow-up, this number had increased slightly to almost 34 percent.

The study did not find quantitative evidence from parents that the program influenced healthy eating by increasing children's fruit and vegetable intake at home, but feedback from teacher surveys and principal interviews suggested it had begun to plant seeds of change. The educators observed that the children had been introduced to new ingredients and tastes; kids were bringing healthier snacks and bag lunches to school; and parents were reporting that their children had become more adventurous eaters at home.

Seeds of change

School-based kitchen and gardening programs are a great way to help children understand where their food comes from and gain life skills in gardening and cooking at an early age, said Karrie Kalich, Ph.D., an associate professor of health sciences at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire, who was not involved in the study. Such programs are also "good for hands-on learners who may not be getting much out of a traditional learning environment," said Kalich, a dietitian who has designed and implemented "Early Sprouts," a gardening and nutrition program in a preschool setting.

Kalich said she wasn't surprised that the study only found evidence of an increased willingness on the part of children to taste new foods. "It's a step in the right direction and a necessary first step," she said, since children ages 8 through 12 still have a pronounced fear of new foods.

Although the ideal research outcome would show that a school-based kitchen and gardening program actually boosted the amount of healthy foods children ate, such a result usually occurs over time as kids transition from rejecting new foods to accepting and enjoying their taste, Kalich pointed out. Still, this result might not satisfy principals or teachers worried about whether or not a gardening curriculum might undermine students' performances on standardized test scores. What's more, not every school has the financial resources or growing climate to implement a gardening program.

The Australian program used part-time specialists to instruct children rather than full-time teachers. But Kalich said in the U.S., school gardening programs might be championed and tended to by a teacher as a labor of love in addition to his or her usual classroom duties.

Pass it on: Children who grow food and prepare it are more likely to try it.

This story was provided by MyHealthNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow MyHealthNewsDaily on Twitter @MyHealth_MHND. Find us on .

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School Gardening Programs Plant Seeds of Healthy Eating

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Involving children in a school gardening program may do more than cultivate a green thumb. It may also cultivate a greater interest in trying new foods, a new study suggests. Australian researchers found that elementary school children had an increased willingness to try new foods after they had grown and cooked them in a school-based kitchen and gardening program.

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Food Computers & the Future of Farming - MIT Food Computer by Caleb Harper

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Food Computers & the Future of Farming - MIT Food Computer by Caleb Harper

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Who Needs Dirt?: Crash Course Kids #27.1

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Vertical Farming, Is It The Future of Food?

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What is the answer? How will we feed the soon to be nine billion people on the planet? Growing food with no soil? Vertical farming? Learn more here!

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Food-Waste Rebel Wants You to Eat Ugly Food | National Geographic

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Food Too "Ugly" to Sell Becomes a Feast for 5,000 People | National Geographic

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Food Too "Ugly" to Sell Becomes a Feast for 5,000 People | National Geographic

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Food Too "Ugly" to Sell Becomes a Feast for 5,000 People | National Geographic

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What do you do with 2,000 pounds of produce that's perfectly edible but a little blemished? You could throw it out, contributing to the massive food waste problem, which results in roughly a third of the world's food supply going to waste.

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What happens to fruits & veggies that don't have the correct shape? Are they wasted, even though they taste the same?

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What happens to fruits & veggies that don't have the correct shape? Are they wasted, even though they taste the same?

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Ugly Fruits and Vegetables is much more than just an entertaining Instagram account. It's a call to action.

The misshapen produce featured in each photo needs your help! About one third of the food humans produce globally gets thrown out, often because it doesn't meet the cosmetic standards people have come to expect from food labels. This is not good for planet Earth.
Take Action: Pledge to Cut Your Food Waste in Half
Basically, we have two options: eat odd-looking produce, which contains the same nutritional value as normal-looking produce, or throw it out, where it will end up in a landfill, release methane gas upon decomposition and contribute to global warming - which is very unhealthy for all of life on Earth.

So don't be shallow when it comes to picking produce. Looking different doesn't mean lesser value. It may appear "ugly" on the outside, but inside it's not only beautiful, but packed with nutrients that make people healthier.

Here are 13 ugly fruits and vegetables that deserve a place in your kitchen, and in your stomach.

Eggplant

Thumbs up for eggplant! This vegetable is high in fiber, vitamin B1 and copper. It's also a good source of manganese, vitamin B6, niacin, potassium, folate, and vitamin K, which means it protects brain cell membranes and is great for cardiovascular health.
Watch: If Ed Sheeran's Shape of You Was About Food Waste
Eggplant is a Global Vegetable Citizen. It's incredibly versatile, used in recipes ranging from Italian to Asian. As a meat substitute, it also helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Originating in China before being brought to Africa and Italy, eggplants can range in colors like lavender, jade green, orange, and yellow-white.

Daikon Radish

Don't walk, run to the supermarket for a daikon.

This member of the radish family has a wide range of health benefits. It eliminates bacteria and other pathogens, making it great for respiratory issues. High levels of vitamin C stimulate white blood cell production, which helps the immune system, and high levels of calcium are good for bones. Daikon oil can keep skin healthy, and daikon juice is good for the digestive system and helps prevent cancer.

Remember: whether you pickle them, roast them, or add them in a soup, use the whole vegetable - daikon leaves are just as nutritious as the root.

Daikon originated in the Mediterranean and has spread to Southeast and East Asia. In fact, "daikon" is Japanese for "big root."

Jackfruit

The largest tree fruit in the world has been dubbed a "miracle crop" that can save millions from starvation.

Jackfruit is full of nutrients like protein, potassium, and vitamin B and its perennial trees require less maintenance than staple crops like wheat, rice and corn.
Read More: 10 Tips for a Delicious and Ethical Summer BBQ
Originating in India, jackfruit has spread to central Africa and South America. Because it thrives in tropical climates, millions could come to rely on jackfruit as global temperatures continue to rise.

If veganism can truly save the world, jackfruit may be the key. Many innovative recipes call for jackfruit as a replacement in fish tacos, crab rangoon, and tuna melts. And for BBQ aficionados, jackfruit can even replace pulled pork. Miracle fruit, indeed.

Green Pepper

This guy wants you to know: peppers keep the body strong.

Bell peppers are high in fiber, which does wonders for the digestive system. But they do much more than make it easier to poop. Bell peppers are a great source of vitamins C and E, which make the body better at healing and keep skin, teeth, gums, and blood vessels in tip-top shape. They also contain antioxidants and zeaxanthin, which helps eyesight.

Cooking with bell peppers is limited only by the imagination. They can be diced up, sautéed, and mixed in with eggs, fajitas or pastas; or stuffed with a million different things. They're also delicious served raw with dressing.

Turmeric

Ok, this one straight-up looks like an alien. But don't let that stop you from enjoying the health benefits of turmeric.
Read More: 11 Famous Chefs Who Are Trying to Save the World With Food
The spice has been around for thousands of years and improves health thanks to a chemical called curcumin. Turmeric helps reduce the risk of cancer and improves cognitive function. And because it balances blood sugar, turmeric can help prevent type 2 diabetes. It also improves kidney function.

This uber-healthy spice is typically used in curry and rice dishes, but can also be used to make lattes and smoothies.

Kiwi

Oranges are widely known for having significant levels of vitamin C, but kiwis actually have a lot more - five times more. Kiwis are rich in vitamin K, which helps blood clot and vitamin A, which is good for skin, bones and teeth. They also reduce heart disease, can help with respiratory problems like asthma, and are one of the best sources of antioxidants.

Kiwis are also great for maternal health. Vitamin B6 strengthens the immune system and keeps fetuses healthy, while folate prevents birth defects. Copper helps brain development and bone growth in children.

From omelettes to shortcake, the two varieties of kiwis (green and gold) can be used at every meal.

Jalapeño Pepper

Jalapeño peppers pack a spicy punch.

Though small, especially compared to many of the other fruits and veggies on this list, one jalapeño provides about 27% of the daily value of vitamin C. In spite of the tears that may flow from eating one, they're actually good for the eyes. Jalapeños contain lutein and zeaxanthin which protect against harmful wavelengths of light and prevent cataracts.
Read More: Bonus Bananas Are Being Turned Into Gourmet Gelato by Australian Farmers
Full of both heat and flavor, jalapeños can be used in countless concoctions, like sandwich spreads, salsa, cocktails, as well as chicken and pasta dishes.

Potato

No, this is not a trap - potatoes are super nutritious.

A single potato contains 18% of the recommended daily value of potassium - more than a banana - which helps lower blood pressure. Potatoes are also rich in vitamin C, fiber, vitamin B6, and iron.

The world's fourth largest food crop, potatoes were first grown by the Incas in Peru and brought to Europe by the Spanish Conquistadors, and spread throughout the continent. There are currently seven main types of potato, which can be used to make dishes in styles from every continent.

Pattypan Squash

Pattypan squash originates from Mexico and Guatemala. It contains no saturated fats or cholesterol. What it does have is potassium and magnesium, which means it's great for heart health. It's also high in folate, crucial for cell division, which can improve maternal health.
Read More: These College Kids Have Diverted More Than 16 Million Pounds of Food Waste
Virtually no part of the vegetable goes to waste. Its peel is an excellent source of fiber, and its flowers can be turned into a side dish.

As for a main course, pattypan squash can be sautéed and mixed with other veggies, or stuffed like a pepper.

Strawberry

Strawberries are among the most popular fruits on the planet, but there's always room for more love - and there's plenty of reason for it.

Packed with vitamin C and manganese, strawberries reduce the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease. They're also high in antioxidants, which act as an anti-inflammatory.

Strawberries are one fruit that it pays to buy organic. The fruit was one of the most common foods containing illegal levels of pesticide residue, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

After avoiding those harmful chemicals, add strawberries to soups, salads, pork dishes, or an infinite number of desserts.

Pineapple

Pineapples are America's second-favorite tropical fruit behind bananas. Like many other fruits and veggies on this list, pineapples are excellent sources of vitamin C, manganese and vitamin B1, which contribute to healing, bone strength, and energy production. But what sets pineapple apart is an enzyme called bromelain, which can help with digestion, reduce inflammation and reduce certain types of tumor growth.
Read More: Craft Beer Uses Leftover Bread to Reduce Food Waste
Studies have shown that eating three portions of fruit everyday can help maintain eyesight. The pineapple's versatility makes this dietary requirement totally possible.

These prickly fruits are delicious with burgers, salsa, guacamole, chicken, pizza - the list goes on.

Carrot

Carrots are one of the most widely-used vegetables in the world. They're easy to grow, and can be enjoyed raw, as a side dish, or prepared as a main course. But they're not just a great snack.

Carrots reduce cholesterol, which means they prevent heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. Rich in potassium, carrots help reduce blood pressure. Full of vitamin C, they help stimulate white blood cell activity which means they're great for the immune system and cardiovascular health.

And they're great with ranch dressing.

Cucumber

Cucumbers are 95% water, but what's left is incredibly beneficial to humans, as they reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and many types of cancer.

Even if your appetite isn't big enough to eat that gargantuan cucumber pictured above, the vegetable has a ton of cosmetic purposes (think: cucumbers on the eyes at every spa). Cucumbers revitalize skin and cucumber extracts have anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

If you are going to eat them, though, do so in a variety of salads, tzatziki, or lemonade.

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13 of the Best Ugly Fruits & Vegetables That Are Still Perfectly Good

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Ugly Fruits and Vegetables is much more than just an entertaining Instagram account. It's a call to action. The misshapen produce featured in each photo needs your help! About one third of the food humans produce globally gets thrown out, often because it doesn't meet the cosmetic standards people have come to expect from food labels.

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Road Trip follows Strawberries Across the USA

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Road Trip follows Strawberries Across the USA

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Road Trip Follows Strawberries Across the U.S. | National Geographic

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A watermelon at the grocery store has traveled from Guatemala to Malone, New York! Calculate how far your food has traveled. What if you grow your own? Then, how far would your food have to travel?

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A watermelon at the grocery store has traveled from Guatemala to Malone, New York! Calculate how far your food has traveled. What if you grow your own? Then, how far would your food have to travel?

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Food Miles: Background and Marketing | ATTRA | National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service

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This publication addresses how food miles are calculated, investigates how food miles affect producers and consumers, and evaluates methods for curbing the energy intensiveness of our food transportation system.

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New York Times Article About the Water Used To Grow Fruit & Veggies in California

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New York Times Article About the Water Used To Grow Fruit & Veggies in California

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The average American consumes more than 300 gallons of California water each week by eating food that was produced there.

Replay

California farmers produce more than a third of the nation's vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. To do that, they use nearly 80 percent of all the water consumed in the state. It is the most stubborn part of the crisis: To fundamentally alter how much water the state uses, all Americans may have to give something up.

The portions of foods shown here are grown in California and represent what average Americans, including non-Californians, eat in a week. We made an estimate of the amount of water it takes to grow each portion to give you a sense of your contribution to the California drought.

The estimates include the amount of water used to make derivative products. For example, grape consumption includes not just fresh grapes, but also wine, jam and juice.

Water Guzzlers

Replay

Americans consume the most water by eating meat and dairy products, primarily because a lot of water is needed to grow the crops to feed the animals. Not all of this water comes from California; about half is imported in the form of crops, like corn, from the Midwest.

Replay

Grown Mostly in California

Replay

A rise in prices may be inevitable if a persistent drought forces California farmers to slash production. "Consumers would have a choice of either substituting the higher-priced product for something else, look for products where imports increased to alleviate some of the shortage, go without, or look for those products that can be grown easily in other states," said Craig A. Chase, a program manager at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

Least Water Consumption

Replay

About the data

The amount of California food available to Americans was estimated using export data from the Agricultural Issues Center at the University of California, Davis. The figures were adjusted with U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates of how much food is lost or spoiled before it is sold to customers.

The amount of water consumed to produce fruits, vegetables and nuts was calculated by the Pacific Institute. Their estimates are drawn from local climate data and plant physiology data reported by the California Department of Water Resources and crop yields reported by the U.S.D.A. Estimates for milk, beef, turkey and eggs are from Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2012).

All estimates here include surface and groundwater consumed during production, called blue water, and rainwater consumed, called green water. They do not include gray water, or water necessary to dilute the effluent from a farm or factory to levels acceptable by local governing standards.

Video editing by Yulia Parshina-Kottas and Graham Roberts

Video editing by Yulia Parshina-Kottas and Graham Roberts

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Your Contribution to the California Drought

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The average American consumes more than 300 gallons of California water each week by eating food that was produced there. Replay California farmers produce more than a third of the nation's vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. To do that, they use nearly 80 percent of all the water consumed in the state.

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What is your carbon footprint? Calculate it now. Offsetting the carbon emissions from your lifestyle is a critical step toward fighting climate change.

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NASA: Space Propaganda Posters - The Future - Space Farmers Wanted!

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NASA: Space Propaganda Posters - The Future - Space Farmers Wanted!

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Frequently Asked Questions

When did NASA develop these Mars Explorers Wanted posters?
NASA originally commissioned these posters for an exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor's Complex in 2009. As part of our Journey to Mars, these versions are now available to everyone online.

How can I make copies of these Mars Explorers Wanted posters?
Download the full-size posters above and provide the files to your local print shop. You can print these posters for non-commercial use.
Please consult the NASA Reproduction Guidelines for further details on this or other uses.

Want to share how you've used the Mars Explorers Wanted posters in your home, school, or community?
Share a picture with us through Facebook or Twitter. #MarsPosters

Does NASA have other sizes of the Mars Explorers Wanted posters?
The only size available for this artwork is 30 x 48 inches at full scale.

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Download a free Mars poster that speaks to you. Eight posters are available for download and printing. Each poster represents a different type of explorer NASA is seeking. Download at go.nasa.gov/235vhAR

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Did you Know that the World Has a Seed Vault? So cool!

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Did you Know that the World Has a Seed Vault? So cool!

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The Doomsday Vault. Sounds ominous doesn't it? What exactly is the Svalbard Seed Vault and why is it so important that it exists in today's world? Come along with us as we visit it and find out exactly what it contains and why it is so essential to future generations.

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This story appears in the September 2017 issue ofNational Geographic magazine.

In a potato field near the Netherlands' border with Belgium, Dutch farmer Jacob van den Borne is seated in the cabin of an immense harvester before an instrument panel worthy of the starship Enterprise.

From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he's monitoring two drones-a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air-that provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne's production numbers testify to the power of this "precision farming," as it's known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne's fields reliably produce more than 20.

That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry "Twice as much food using half as many resources." Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent. They've almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.

One more reason to marvel: The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country, with more than 1,300 inhabitants per square mile. It's bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it's the globe's number two exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270 times its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it?

Seen from the air, the Netherlands resembles no other major food producer-a fragmented patchwork of intensely cultivated fields, most of them tiny by agribusiness standards, punctuated by bustling cities and suburbs. In the country's principal farming regions, there's almost no potato patch, no greenhouse, no hog barn that's out of sight of skyscrapers, manufacturing plants, or urban sprawl. More than half the nation's land area is used for agriculture and horticulture.

Banks of what appear to be gargantuan mirrors stretch across the countryside, glinting when the sun shines and glowing with eerie interior light when night falls. They are Holland's extraordinary greenhouse complexes, some of them covering 175 acres.

These climate-controlled farms enable a country located a scant thousand miles from the Arctic Circle to be a global leader in exports of a fair-weather fruit: the tomato. The Dutch are also the world's top exporter of potatoes and onions and the second largest exporter of vegetables overall in terms of value. More than a third of all global trade in vegetable seeds originates in the Netherlands.

The brain trust behind these astounding numbers is centered at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), located 50 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Widely regarded as the world's top agricultural research institution, WUR is the nodal point of Food Valley, an expansive cluster of agricultural technology start-ups and experimental farms. The name is a deliberate allusion to California's Silicon Valley, with Wageningen emulating the role of Stanford University in its celebrated merger of academia and entrepreneurship.

Ernst van den Ende, managing director of WUR's Plant Sciences Group, embodies Food Valley's blended approach. A renowned scholar with the casual manner of a barista at a hip café, van den Ende is a world authority on plant pathology. But, he says, "I'm not simply a college dean. Half of me runs Plant Sciences, but the other half oversees nine separate business units involved in commercial contract research." Only that mix, "the science-driven in tandem with the market-driven," he maintains, "can meet the challenge that lies ahead."

The challenge? Put in bluntly apocalyptic terms, he says, the planet must produce "more food in the next four decades than all farmers in history have harvested over the past 8,000 years."

That's because by 2050, the Earth will be home to as many as 10 billion people, up from today's 7.5 billion. If massive increases in agricultural yield are not achieved, matched by massive decreases in the use of water and fossil fuels, a billion or more people may face starvation. Hunger could be the 21st century's most urgent problem, and the visionaries working in Food Valley believe they have found innovative solutions. The wherewithal to stave off catastrophic famine is within reach, van den Ende insists. His optimism rests on feedback from more than a thousand WUR projects in more than 140 countries and on its formal pacts with governments and universities on six continents to share advances and implement them.

A conversation with van den Ende is a white-knuckle ride on a torrent of brainstorms, statistics, and predictions. African drought? "Water isn't the fundamental problem. It's poor soil," he says. "The absence of nutrients can be offset by cultivating plants that act in symbiosis with certain bacteria to produce their own fertilizer." The soaring cost of grain to feed animals? "Feed them grasshoppers instead," he says. One hectare of land yields one metric ton of soy protein, a common livestock feed, a year. The same amount of land can produce 150 tons of insect protein.

The conversation rushes on to the use of LED lighting to permit 24-hour cultivation in precisely climate-controlled greenhouses. It then detours to a misconception that sustainable agriculture means minimal human intervention in nature.

"Look at the island of Bali!" he exclaims. For at least a thousand years, its farmers have raised ducks and fish within the same flooded paddies where rice is cultivated. It's an entirely self-contained food system, irrigated by intricate canal systems along mountain terraces sculpted by human hands.

"There's your model of sustainability," van den Ende says.

At every turn in the Netherlands, the future of sustainable agriculture is taking shape-not in the boardrooms of big corporations but on thousands of modest family farms. You see it vividly in the terrestrial paradise of Ted Duijvestijn and his brothers Peter, Ronald, and Remco. Like the Balinese, the Duijvestijns have constructed a self-contained food system in which a near-perfect balance prevails between human ingenuity and nature's potential.

At the Duijvestijns' 36-acre greenhouse complex near the old city of Delft, visitors stroll among ranks of deep green tomato vines, 20 feet tall. Rooted not in soil but in fibers spun from basalt and chalk, the plants are heavy with tomatoes-15 varieties in all-to suit the taste of the most demanding palate. In 2015 an international jury of horticultural experts named the Duijvestijns the world's most innovative tomato growers.

Since relocating and restructuring their 70-year-old farm in 2004, the Duijvestijns have declared resource independence on every front. The farm produces almost all of its own energy and fertilizer and even some of the packaging materials necessary for the crop's distribution and sale. The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands.

The only irrigation source is rainwater, says Ted, who manages the cultivation program. Each kilogram of tomatoes from his fiber-rooted plants requires less than four gallons of water, compared with 16 gallons for plants in open fields. Once each year the entire crop is regrown from seeds, and the old vines are processed to make packaging crates. The few pests that manage to enter the Duijvestijn greenhouses are greeted by a ravenous army of defenders such as the fierce Phytoseiulus persimilis, a predatory mite that shows no interest in tomatoes but gorges itself on hundreds of destructive spider mites.

A few days before I visited the Duijvestijns' operation, Ted had attended a meeting of farmers and researchers at Wageningen. "This is how we come up with innovative ways to move ahead, to keep improving," he told me. "People from all over Holland get together to discuss different perspectives and common goals. No one knows all the answers on their own."

The search for answers to a life-or-death question gave rise to one of the Netherlands' most innovative companies. Half a century ago, Jan Koppert was growing cucumbers on his land and using toxic chemical sprays to fend off pests. When a physician declared him allergic to pesticides, Koppert set out to learn all he could about the natural enemies of insects and arachnids.

Today Koppert Biological Systems is the global pacesetter in biological pest and disease control, with 1,330 employees and 26 international subsidiaries marketing its products in 96 countries. Koppert's firm can provide you with cotton bags of ladybug larvae that mature into voracious consumers of aphids. Or how about a bottle containing 2,000 of those predatory mites that hunt down spider mites on plants and suck them dry? Or a box of 500 million nematodes that mount deadly assaults on fly larvae that prey on commercial mushrooms?

Koppert's legions make love as well as war, in the guise of enthusiastic bumblebees. No form of artificial pollination matches the efficiency of bees buzzing from flower to flower, gathering nectar to nourish their queen and helping to fertilize the ovaries of plants along the way. Each Koppert hive accounts for daily visits to half a million flowers. Farmers using the bees typically report 20 to 30 percent increases in yields and fruit weight, for less than half the cost of artificial pollination.

Nowhere is the Netherlands' agricultural technology more cutting-edge than in the embryonic organism in which most food is literally rooted: seeds. And nowhere are the controversies that surround the future of agriculture more heated. Chief among them is the development of genetically modified organisms to produce larger and more pest-resistant crops. To their critics, GMOs conjure up a Frankenstein scenario, fraught with uncertainty about the consequences of radical experimentation with living entities.

Dutch firms are among the world leaders in the seed business, with close to $1.7 billion worth of exports in 2016. Yet they market no GMO products. A new seed variety in Europe's heavily regulated GMO arena can cost a hundred million dollars and require 12 to 14 years of research and development, according to KeyGene's Arjen van Tunen. By contrast, the latest achievements in the venerable science of molecular breeding-which introduces no foreign genes-can deliver remarkable gains in five to 10 years, with development costs as low as $100,000 and seldom more than a million dollars. It is a direct descendant of methods employed by farmers in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago.

The sales catalog of Rijk Zwaan, another Dutch breeder, offers high-yield seeds in more than 25 broad groups of vegetables, many that defend themselves naturally against major pests. Heleen Bos is responsible for the company's organic accounts and international development projects. She might be expected to dwell on the fact that a single high-tech Rijk Zwaan greenhouse tomato seed, priced below $0.50, has been known to produce a mind-boggling 150 pounds of tomatoes. Instead she talks about the hundreds of millions of people, most of them women and children, who lack sufficient food.

Like many of the entrepreneurs at Food Valley firms, Bos has worked in the fields and cities of the world's poorest nations. With lengthy postings to Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Bangladesh over the past 30 years, she knows that hunger and devastating famine are not abstract threats.

"Of course, we can't immediately implement the kind of ultrahigh-tech agriculture over there that you see in the Netherlands," she says. "But we are well into introducing medium-tech solutions that can make a huge difference." She cites the proliferation of relatively inexpensive plastic greenhouses that have tripled some crop yields compared with those of open fields, where crops are more subject to pests and drought.

Since 2008 Rijk Zwaan has supported a breeding program in Tanzania at a 50-acre trial field in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its seeds are sent to Holland for quality control tests on germination rates, purity, and resistance to pests and diseases. Collaborative projects are under way in Kenya, Peru, and Guatemala. "We try to develop seeds for their specific conditions," Bos says. But the starting point, she adds emphatically, cannot be the sort of top-down approach that has doomed many well-meaning foreign aid projects.

"We have constant, tremendously important conversations with the small growers themselves-on their needs, on the weather and soil conditions they face, on costs," she says.

For some Dutch researchers, concern for people threatened by hunger stems in part from a national trauma: The Netherlands was the last Western country to suffer a serious famine, when 10,000 to 20,000 people died in German-occupied lands during the final year of World War II. Decades later, WUR's Rudy Rabbinge, professor emeritus of sustainable development and food security, took up the cause when he helped devise extensive changes in the faculty, student body, and curriculum that transformed the institution into what he calls "a university for the world, and not simply for the Dutch." Today a hefty share of the academic and research activities at WUR are focused on problems facing poor nations.

Some 45 percent of its graduate students-including nearly two-thirds of all Ph.D. candidates-are recruited abroad, representing more than a hundred nations. Asians, led by Chinese and Indonesians, outnumber almost all non-Dutch Europeans combined. WUR alumni are found in the highest echelons of agricultural ministries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

In a campus cafeteria, I sit down with three of WUR's most promising students, a description that, not long ago, would have meant male and Dutch born. All three are young women, hailing from Uganda, Nepal, and Indonesia.

"I met a Wageningen alumna when I was an undergrad in Uganda," Leah Nandudu tells me when I ask how she wound up here. "She was an expert on phenotyping," the advanced studies that paint a detailed portrait of a plant's traits and potential. "It inspired me to discover that an African could do these things. She was the future; she was where we need to go."

The meeting eventually led Nandudu to a WUR scholarship. Her father farms three acres, split between coffee and bananas. Her mother teaches English in a primary school and helps in the field. "We have all the problems farmers face everywhere today, only much worse, especially due to the consequences of climate change."

Pragya Shrestha was raised in the Nepali countryside, some parts of which have been wracked by years of reliance on pesticides and fertilizers. Sounder, sustainable methods have made few inroads so far.

"It's a political problem," she says. New cultivation methods can't be implemented because of a shortage of public funding. "It's also a population problem, the fragmentation of the land into smaller and smaller parcels, suitable only for the use of inefficient human labor and generating very little income."

Renna Eliana Warjoto is from Bandung, the third largest city in Indonesia. "People are mistrustful of ideas that come from abroad," she says, as Shrestha and Nandudu nod in agreement. "Farmers are so used to having marginal lives and incomes," she adds, "that they have a hard time believing things could be different."

In 1944-45 a lethal famine struck the island of Java, where Bandung is located, killing some 2.4 million people. Devastating regional crop failures have haunted Indonesia as recently as 2005. Food supplies periodically run out in rural Nepal because of drought and high prices on essential imports. In 2011 a famine in the Horn of Africa affected 13 million people, and in 2017 1.6 million Ugandans face starvation without rapid assistance from abroad. All these events were unimaginable at the time, yet they pale in comparison to what could lie ahead. The number of people menaced by famine in just three African nations and across the Red Sea in Yemen exceeds 20 million today and is rising inexorably, according to the United Nations. "We are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the UN," the organization's emergency relief coordinator, Stephen O'Brien, warned in March.

"Our most difficult task is changing the perceptions of our own people-about the crisis we confront and what we must do to address it," Nandudu says. "That's my job when I go home. We cannot turn our faces away from reality."

Some 4,000 miles south of Wageningen, in a family-owned bean field in Africa's Eastern Rift Valley, a team from SoilCares, a Dutch agricultural technology firm, explains the functions of a small handheld device. In conjunction with a cell phone app, the device analyzes the soil's pH, organic matter, and other properties, then uploads the results to a database in the Netherlands and returns a detailed report on optimal fertilizer use and nutrient needs-all in less than 10 minutes. At a cost of a few dollars, the report provides input that can help reduce crop losses by enormous margins to farmers who have never had access to soil sampling of any kind.

Less than 5 percent of the world's estimated 570 million farms have access to a soil lab. That's the kind of number the Dutch see as a challenge.

"What does our work mean for developing countries? That question is always raised here," says Martin Scholten, who directs WUR's Animal Sciences Group. "It's part of every conversation."

Frank Viviano, a foreign correspondent based in Italy, has covered stories in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.Luca Locatelli specializes in photographing interactions between people and technology.

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This story appears in the September 2017 issue ofNational Geographic magazine. In a potato field near the Netherlands' border with Belgium, Dutch farmer Jacob van den Borne is seated in the cabin of an immense harvester before an instrument panel worthy of the starship Enterprise.

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Wiki How: How To Grow Hydroponic Lettuce

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Wiki How: How To Grow Hydroponic Lettuce

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How to Grow Hydroponic Lettuce. If you're itching to have a garden but don't have the yard space, growing hydroponically, or without the use of soil, is a solid alternative.http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hydroponics Lettuce is the...