Agriculture

Weeks before his reelection bid, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced Saturday that the government would cancel hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of debt owed by farmers and livestock producers, the state-run news agency reported. Voters in the natural-gas-rich North African country go to the polls for the presidential election on April 9. Bouteflika is running for a third term, an option that parliament gave him recently by changing the constitution.

President Hugo Chavez on Saturday sent troops to temporarily take over rice processing plants in the South American nation, his toughest move against industry since winning a referendum last month. In a dispute over the price of one of Venezuela's staples, Chavez told soldiers to take control of the rice mills, which could include installations owned by U.S. giant Cargill.

With his nation's economy in shambles, President Robert Mugabe threw himself a lavish 85th birthday party Saturday, using the opportunity to call on Zimbabwe's last white farmers to leave. "Land distribution will continue. It will not stop," Mugabe said in Chinhoyi, 60 miles from Harare. "The few remaining white farmers should quickly vacate their farms as they have no place there."

Like many black professionals during the dark days of apartheid, Diale and Malmsey Rangaka dreamed of leaving the crowded township of Soweto. But, unlike their neighbors, they didn't want to move to the gated white suburbs. They wanted to be farmers. For years Diale, an English literature professor, would chatter away about cattle ranching, quoting the latest issue of Farmer's Weekly. His wife was skeptical.

Key Democrats reached a deal Tuesday that its supporters hope will lead to House passage of the biggest environmental bill in decades, one aimed at slowing the heating of the planet. Farm-state Democrats won concessions that will delay the Environmental Protection Agency from drafting regulations that could hamper the ethanol industry and will hand the Agriculture Department oversight of potentially lucrative projects to reduce greenhouse gases on farms.

After more than 20 years farming onions, Steve Gill still breaks out in tears at his processing facility. Only now he's crying all the way to the bank. He recently began using juice from his pungent crop to create energy to run his refrigerators and lighting. That's slicing $700,000 annually off the electric bill at his 14-acre plant in Oxnard. He's also saving $400,000 a year on disposal costs. And he has secured more than $3 million in government and power company incentives to do it.

The Lockes have tilled the rich soil along the Mokelumne River since 1850. Now Chris Locke, 57, looks forward to passing down his orchards of 40,000 walnut trees to his four sons. But the threat of global warming has him worried. "I talk to my boys about climate change," he said. When he was young, frigid fogs rolled off the delta into Lockeford, the town named for his forebears. "We would go a week without seeing the sun. But we don't seem to get that weather anymore."

Facing accusations that they were fast tracking approval of a known carcinogen, state pesticide regulators have resumed a review of the fumigant methyl iodide for use on strawberry fields. A peer review of methyl iodide had been suspended during the state budget crisis, prompting concern from legislators and environmentalists that the agency and the governor were bowing to industry pressure to approve the chemical as a substitute for the banned fumigant methyl bromide.

Jose Rosario Valencia started feeling nauseated just after 9 a.m. on July 17. His heart rate sped up and his knees buckled. Valencia was scared. He'd heard of other farmworkers dying of heat stroke in the fields. "I thought about my family and how they would suffer," said Valencia, 46, who moves irrigation pipes in the onion fields.

Unlike most farms in China, no heaps of blackened sewage sludge are piled on the fields at the Green Cow farm. No workers spray pesticides from pumps strapped to their backs. No animals are in quarantine. An oasis in a Beijing suburb, the organic farm's modest six acres boast pepper and tomato plants, fields of corn and wheat, and sunflower patches that pop up in between. Two rotund cows chomp on grasses; under a grove of fruit trees, three young pigs slurp water. Restaurateur and environmentalist Lejen Chen started Green Cow with her husband in 2004, fearful of the pesticides, chemical fertilizers and sewage sludge used in the cultivation of most domestic produce.