Towns and cities in the world's developing countries are growing on an unprecedented scale. Ten years ago, an estimated 40 percent of the developing world's population - or 2 billion people - lived in urban areas.

A global study of land and agricultural methods shows dramatic differences in soil quality between farms that employ some simple management tools and those that don’t. “Clever farmers” show how we can make healthier, more productive soil.

Conservation agriculture is a system that utilises soils for the production of crops with the aim of reducing excessive use of the soil and maintaining crop residues on the soil surface in order to minimise damage to the environment.

History’s brightest minds are not always our modern day heroes, and as decades pass, the consequences of ingenious discoveries unfold. This is especially true in the history of agriculture.

Imagine “carbon emissions”, and what springs to mind? Most people tend to think of power stations belching out clouds of carbon dioxide or queues of vehicles burning up fossil fuels as they crawl, bumper-to-bumper, along congested urban roads.

The western monarch butterfly population wintering along California’s coast remains critically low for the second year in a row, a count by an environmental group released Thursday showed.