5@5: Walgreens to sell CBD products in 9 states | The 'crazy' fight over the future of vegetables

Walgreens to start selling CBD-infused products in 9 states

Right on the heels of a similar announcement from CVS, Walgreens has revealed that it will start selling hemp CBD products in Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Kentucky, Tennessee, Vermont, South Carolina, Illinois and Indiana. Walgreens has not divulged which brands they will be carrying or when the products will be rolling out. Read more at Mercury News …

The crazy food fight over the future of vegetables

Vertical farming, though hugely popular among venture capitalists, has a far higher carbon footprint in terms of energy used when compared with produce grown in a greenhouse or soil-based farm. This finding gives credence to the many conventional farmers who argue that there are no silver bullets when it comes to increasing food supply for a growing population, and that a combination of many ecologically mindful approaches may be necessary to feed future generations. Read more at Men's Health …

Farmers bet big on the South’s first organic hemp cooperative

The state of Kentucky is aiming to be “the leader, and the epicenter, of industrial hemp production in the United States,” according to the state’s Department of Agriculture. Farmers at one certified organic hemp cooperative are preparing for an organic hemp “gold rush” because of its rarity in the space and the relatively lengthy time it will take conventional health farms to obtain USDA organic certification. Read more at Civil Eats …

Can soil microbes slow climate change?

Global carbon emissions hit an all-time high last year, and some experts are now arguing that finding an optimized way to store carbon dioxide from the air into the soil while also increasing agricultural years is of the utmost importance. One approach to this would be to “tip the soil’s fungal to bacterial ratio strongly toward the fungi.” Microbiologist David Johnson asserts that if this agricultural approach were implemented, “the entire world’s carbon output from 2016 could be stored on just 22 percent of the globe’s arable land.” However, this emerging technique has note yet been tested to see if it could scale up economically on large commercial farms. Read more at Scientific American …

The enormous numbers behind Amazon’s market reach

As talk of regulating the e-retailer behemoth ramps up in the political sphere, Amazon’s growing presence in multiple markets may soon be its downfall. However, Amazon officials continue to stress that the “company’s broad reach is not on its own an indication of market power … And despite being the largest e-commerce player, Amazon still accounts for roughly 1 percent of global retail.” Read more at Bloomberg …