Want to Create a New Generation of Farmers? Forgive Their College Debt
The problem isn’t that young people aren’t interested in farming—it’s that millennials, carrying the burden of weighty student loans, simply can’t afford it. Which is why the National Young Farmers Coalition is launching the “Farming is a Public Service” campaign, asking for an amendment to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program to include farmers.

Is State-of-the-Art Farming Coming to a Field near You?
When cornstalks reach their mature height, it’s impossible for farmworkers or tractors to navigate the cornfields to apply nitrogen. To optimize nitrogen application in cornfields, Kent Cavender-Bares created Rowbot, a robot that was small enough to navigate between rows of mature corn and strong enough to haul gallons of nitrogen to fertilize the plants. Rowbot is at the forefront of a new trend: entrepreneurs creating high-tech applications for agriculture.
 
Is It Time to Recognize the Nutritional Value of Human Waste?
The average person produces 500 liters of urine and feces in a year, which contain enough nutrients to grow the crops that person would need to feed themselves entirely for that year. The Haiti-based, not-for-profit Soil is an initiative that transforms human waste into resources. The organization treats 240,000 gallons of waste every year and has sold 75,000 gallons of compost.
 
Pesticides Just Got a Whole Lot Smaller. Is That a Good Thing?
Nanotechnology has changed the medical world—the same could be true in farming. By shrinking the size of pesticide droplets down to nano-scale, scientists could help decrease overall pesticide use in US agriculture. Which is a big thing—although we’ve come down a bit from the pesticide heyday of the 1980s, we still poured out 516 million pounds of pesticides in 2008 alone