Those who make whistles impossible make vuvuzelas inevitable

Food is not the only thing that determines your health. You also need healthy soil, clean water, and a livable climate. If the entire nation increases its consumption of meat and dairy, we will not have any of those latter three things.

Now that it’s pointing down it’s perfect

ICYMI…the most gobsmacking fact from this reporting—>how much land will be needed to produce sustainable aviation fuel “The maximum amount of land that we’ve converted to cropland in a single year (roughly 1.8 million acres), would have to be quadrupled every year for the next 30 years,” said Limb.

Big updates! First, I have a new paper out in the Journal of Environmental Quality demonstrating a technique to improve predictions of soil N2O by individually modeling different "modes" of N2O production. Also, I blogged about the inspiration on my new website! www.ryanackett.com/entries/clas...

Agricultural soil carbon sequestration gets a lot of attention but let’s not forget that the best way to keep carbon in soils is to stop further expansion of agriculture into natural ecosystems. #WorldSoilDay

Mycorrhizal biofertilizers are a $1 billion industry as alternatives to synthetic nitrogen. However, commercial biofertilizers are often poor quality, with new research finding 85% did not form symbiotic nodules with plant roots, & had no effect onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

citing myself in a paper

big paper submission yesterday that I'm incredibly excited about! modeling N2O emissions from ag is notoriously difficult, but with some clever compromises ( high temporal resolution vs high quantitative resolution) we can achieve remarkably accurate results that can drive mitigation efforts!

big paper submission yesterday that I'm incredibly excited about! modeling N2O emissions from ag is notoriously difficult, but with some clever compromises ( high temporal resolution vs high quantitative resolution) we can achieve remarkably accurate results that can drive mitigation efforts!

Fabulous newsletter out by Sarah this morning on the contradictions between beautiful *dreams* of agriculture and the real making of a better food system. These ideas could not be more important, and yet could not be more marginal. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Fabulous newsletter out by Sarah this morning on the contradictions between beautiful *dreams* of agriculture and the real making of a better food system. These ideas could not be more important, and yet could not be more marginal. substack.com/home/post/p-...

BREAKING: The USDA tells states funds will be made available later today to pay November SNAP benefits in full.

It's a classic win win where cows get grass and meadowlarks get something that's not corn or subdivisions, but biodiversity, land, climate (not just methane, but also nitrous oxide) still suffers.

Most of our most ecologically significant "protected" grasslands are in the production game, and they are DYING, at least compared to the few that aren't. But yeah, conventional corn is worse.

Can you even imagine a pre-tomato Italy?! Weird to think that the entire history of the Roman Empire was tomato-free. 🍅 🇮🇹 🚫

recommendation for people looking to cover up their Deathly Hallows tattoos: some interpretation of the horticultural Disease Triangle

What made the Green New Deal such an galvanizing frame is that it linked climate policies with people's real material conditions. It suggested you could build a happier, more prosperous life for yourself via greening the economy. What Mamdani has done is just another iteration of that strategy.

No matter how hard people try to convince us having empathy is wrong, it is right. No matter how hard people try to convince us that diversity is a weakness, it is a strength. No matter how hard people try to convince us that love is limited, it is unlimited.

For years, there's been a massive over-emphasis on food miles, and a massive under-emphasis on food type. By far and away the best dietary decision you can make, for environmental, humanitarian and public health purposes, is to cut out animal products.

"How much soy we produce shouldn’t be a barometer for how well our agriculture sector is doing, but for how unsustainable it is." I wrote for @newrepublic.com that the trade war with China shows we grow too many crops to feed not people but factory-farmed animals. newrepublic.com/article/2014...

New pub alert! The biggest source of GHG from crops is not CO2 (like industry) or methane (like animal ag), but nitrous oxide. Emissions aren't constant though- they're usually low but occasionally explode into "hot moments"- the focus of my PhD work agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

New pub alert! The biggest source of GHG from crops is not CO2 (like industry) or methane (like animal ag), but nitrous oxide. Emissions aren't constant though- they're usually low but occasionally explode into "hot moments"- the focus of my PhD work agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Details not mentioned in this glowing bio: her peddling of vaccine skepticism and autism conspiracies. This is a premier science community, we really need to do better than this.

Why is @agu.org honoring an antiscience conspiracy theorist, including dangerous falsehoods about autism, as the keynote speaker for the largest climate science conference in America? I could not be more disappointed by this decision

Accepted! Look for my first first-author publication, "Statistical identification of nitrous oxide hot moments and their significance across global agroecosystems," coming soon to the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences!

'How citizen science can help to solve the freshwater crisis: How can we monitor freshwater bodies globally and identify pollution hotspots so that we can hold polluters accountable? The answer, I think, is citizen science: the public’s active involvement in research.' www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Here's my open access paper "Who is an American farmer? Who counts in American agriculture?"! I show that using $1,000 sales value as the threshold to be considered a farmer in the Census of Agriculture + increasing the # of operators per farm results in vast overestimates of "farms" & "farmers" 1/

The answer to the many, many stories of shady carbon credits has been verification. Surely if these credits are audited, we can trust them, right? A new study says nope, conflict of interest abounds. @rishpardikar.bsky.social has the story for @drilledmedia.bsky.social drilled.media/news/carbon-...

In agency after agency, the U.S. government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of policies. (Published April)

A really thoughtful piece by @lisaelaineh.bsky.social. MAHA w/o addressing climate change and its ag causes, including confined animal feeding operations & biofuels, is a pathetic fig leaf while extractive ag keeps adding fuel to the fire. Energy & ag policies need to change to address CC impacts.

momentum limits would actually be rad. always in a hurry? better buy a miata

Hello friends! After being away from this website for a while, it is my pleasure to announce that I have become the very first Dr. Ackett! After defending my dissertation on nitrous oxide GHG emissions from ag soils, I hope to finally return to my passion of making posts on the internet. #PhDone

The Call for Abstracts to our conference „The Land Question/Die Bodenfrage" just went online. The conference asks what it would mean to socialize land today, to democratize land ownership and reorient land use to fulfill social needs and ecological demands. criticaltheoryinberlin.de/event/the-la...

The biggest misconception about US ag is that there never was any Get Big or Get Out "era." Consolidation has been happening from the jump, unceasingly through every policy era, because it's the inevitable economic outcome of the privatized farm model.

not sure this is the best idea considering that the leading cause of autism is "parents with autism"

The biggest misconception about US ag is that there never was any Get Big or Get Out "era." Consolidation has been happening from the jump, unceasingly through every policy era, because it's the inevitable economic outcome of the privatized farm model.

Regulatory Capture

Cattle tearing up public lands in the American West is a taxpayer subsidized environmental catastrophe driving wildlife to the brink of extinction. Getting cattle out is the step 1 of Western ecological restoration. Can you guess the next step? thebaffler.com/salvos/wrenc... @thebaffler.com

Dream team up 😍

Could not care less about egg prices, the real crisis we're in right now is the cost of honeycrisp apples

A sheriff in Mississippi, the highest paid and most powerful public figure in his county, staffed his mother’s commercial chicken farm with inmates from the local jail and used taxpayer-purchased equipment to improve it, an investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today found.

example #9082 that when it comes to farms, the "family" descriptor is in no way synonymous with "ethical" www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...

Convict leasing is alive and well in Mississippi apparently. It used to be the job of the FBI and DOJ to investigate and prosecute such racist abuses at the local level, but now they’re laser focused on protecting Tesla dealerships for the world’s richest man. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...

Illinois unlawfully restricts your right to paddle rivers. Federal law sets a floor—states can expand access, not restrict it. Iowa & Indiana offer more freedom than Illinois, something every Illinoisan should find embarrassing! Tell your legislator to fix this. prairierivers.org/action-items...

"These people protected US forests & lands. Their jobs have now vanished due to Trump. 'There are a lot of people saying the national parks are going to be trashed. This is more than just trashed parks. This is the future of our ecosystems and our public lands.'" www.theguardian.com/environment/...

My paper "Compounded extraction: An examination of early agro-extractivism in the US Heartland" is out today at EPE: Nature and Space. I argue that the land grants, particularly the railroad and education ones, used the land itself to bootstrap extractivist ag-centered development activities. 1/

USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is trying to rehire them In a statement, an Agriculture Department spokesperson told NBC News that officials are "working to swiftly rectify the situation." www.nbcnews.com/politics/dog...