Turning Farm Workers Into Farmers

Fed up with living in the world's most polluted city, some residents are fighting back, on their rooftops and backyards. In 2010, India launched the Jawarharlal Nehru Solar Mission, a government program to deploy 20,000 megawatts of grid-connected solar power in the country, but much of this push for renewable energy has only been focused on rural areas, leading urban residents to take up local control of their energy supplies.

It’s no secret that, although progress has been made, school lunches need help to become more nutritious and sustainable. School officials in San Francisco are partnering with researchers from UC Berkeley's School of Public Health to better school lunch programs and, ultimately, curb child obesity.

Half of U.S. farm workers are Hispanic, but few make it to leadership positions. A historically white non-profit, FFA, is creating equal education programs in California to increase leadership opportunities for minorities in agriculture.

In India, many farmers, especially women farmers, have transitioned to organic farming. While it requires a serious set of skills and knowledge, organic farming increases yields and decreases costs by eliminating the need to buy pesticides. The move is both ecological and economical, and the Indian government is trying to spread the solution.

To combat hunger and malnutrition, Digital Green, an N.G.O., is creating and delivering videos about cheap, innovative farming techniques that can substantially increase small farmers' production of staple foods in India, Ghana, and Ethiopia.

Culinary and agricultural education can sometimes take a backseat to the more academic side of high school. But Blue Hill is teaching high school students the importance of healthy cooking and home grown produce through a cooking class that was recently instituted in Manhattan high schools.

The System of Root Intensification (SRI) method resulted in dramatically high yields from one Indian village. The system centers on a "less is more" approach and results in higher yields—without the use of GMOs. The idea has faced barriers in spreading, as scientists are wary of it, even as villagers embrace the empirically successful approach.

For years, one of Cleveland's poorest neighborhoods seemed unalterable no matter how many government programs and well-meaning philanthropies got involved; a place where abject poverty, joblessness and crime reinforce the racism in a city long divided, and where infants still die at a higher rate than almost anywhere else in the country. But a former CIA executive and a new breed of lettuce are transforming the poorest parts of the Rust Belt city.

Students in public schools are eating healthier cafeteria meals made from an increasing array of locally sourced food, according to new federal data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nearly $600 million in locally produced food was purchased by schools in the 2013-14 academic year, a 55 percent increase over 2011-12. However, new studies on school nutrition have yielded mixed results about the impact of new federal regulations.

As India's government promotes organic exports, farmers in Punjab have non-economic reasons for avoiding pesticides: Their health.