in 1862, abraham lincoln created the department of agriculture. and two and a half years later, lincoln said it is precisely the people s department in which they feel more directly concerned than any other. more than 150 years later, that still rings largely true. for all the demonization of the big bad government, americans across the country in every last pocket of the land rely on the usda in some form or fashion. among its many crucial functions, the usda produces a ton of research for america s farmers to use. much of that research is done by two agencies, the national institute of food and agriculture, and the economic research service. here are some of the kinds of things those agencies look at. assisting farmers and ranchers in times of stress, providing
is we re actually doing. i don t know if you saw the news the other day, the usda did move two offices out of washington, d.c. yes, you can applaud that one. that s what we ve been talking about doing. guess what happened? more than nearly half the peopl about doing. guess what happened? more than half of the people quit. it s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker, mulvaney said, i know that because a lot of them work for me and i tried. he explained that by uprooting people suddenly, you can get them to quit and what a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven t been able to do for a long time. ah, yes, draining the swamp by liquidating the agency that might file reports on how to drain a swamp for airable land. it s not enough to call climate change a chinese hoax and make mind-breakingly stupid jokes whenever it snows. the trump administration is actually making the u.s. government stupider collectively so farmers will have a harder time coping wi
bedminster, new jersey, bulldozed the land, carved the holes, the whole thing, and then, you know, and worked there up until this year. they ve returned home with the money they earned in that job, and they you know, they look back on it as a good experience. they made more than they could in their small village in costa rica. some own land. they have their own houses. they have cattle. for them this was a positive experience. there are people who also tell you they had bad experiences with individual managers who were abusive or very demanding who essentially knew they were undocumented and could exploit them. but a lot of people are very thankful for this job. yeah, in some ways it s sort of the paradigm of a win-win and net benefit. everyone here has in this contractual relationship that was entered into seemed to benefit. josh partlow, thanks for reporting.
planetary metabolic process that humans are somewhat in control of is kind of driving the planet is part of what s driving the planet into global warming and part of what s making the planet hotter and part of what s driving up carbon pollution, and we need to get a handle on that and get a handle on kind of how we re managing this one planet that we have if we want to really start seriously addressing climate change. well, there s also these sort of force choices. so, one of the things you ll read about and there s a report i think recently about reforestation. so, we ve got too much carbon in the atmosphere and there s one technology we know how to take carbon out of the atmosphere. that s forests. trees are very good at this. but if we wanted to plant a ton of lapped to to that, a lot of land we would do that on would be on the same kind of farmland that we re going to need to grow food as farmable land shrinks. exactly, exactly. so, right now, like humans kind of manage 70%
wild. and you know, when we cut into that like wild third, what we re often, like, getting back is the kind of most productive, most airable, best farming land on the planet. and if we want to start planting trees to pick up carbon, which as you said, that recent study said if we planted an entire continental united states worth of trees, we could actually like mitigate two-thirds of climate change. but we d be planting an entire continental united states worth of trees. and if you looked, like, there s not a continental united states, like, worth of land to just go around on the planet. right. and so, exactly like we start hitting these trade-offs extremely rapidly. and in fact, we already are. when you talk about the food supply, i mean, one of the things that connects what we were just talking about in this story is the usda does have climate scientists who work on researching how climate will affect crop yields. there s been some crazy research about the way that warmer tempe