About 50% of the world's food production relies on ammonia fertilizer, an important source of nitrogen that is essential for plant growth. In some fields, it is not uncommon to see 90 kg (200 pounds) of ammonia per acre for each growing season.

The American spirit lives on at a 300-year-old, cream-line dairy farm, where a farmer is working around the clock to bottle his own milk after his processor told him to dump it. Locals are lining up to support him. When Ben Brown's dairy processor told him they could no longer buy his milk, he got [...]

Eat and Drink In 2014, Liz and Michael Nail founded Mile High Fungi, a Conifer farm bringing cultivated and wild-grown mushrooms to local tables. * Liz Nail has a confession: When she went to college, she sorta, kinda, didn't like mushrooms. But one night at a potluck dinner with friends, she saw her peers eating chanterelles and thought maybe they were worth trying again.

Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company's chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Rami Levy, one of Israel's largest supermarket chains, has been cooperating with two Israeli agri-tech start-ups to erect large containers to grow fruit and vegetables, which will be sold in the chain's stores.

Updated Nov 21: 750 acres in the title was a typo; the correct number is 720 According to Nate Storey, the future of farms is vertical. It's also indoors, can be placed anywhere on the planet, is heavily integrated with robots and AI, and produces better fruits and vegetables while using 95% less water and 99% less land.

Years of drought, erratic weather and other stresses are taking their toll on the peppers that are central to the state's economy and identity. HATCH, N.M. - In all her eight decades of farming in southeastern New Mexico, June Rutherford has never seen a chile season this bad.