Other writing

Duck-shaped potatoes. Curvy cucumbers. Broken carrots. Some food sellers, after decades of displaying piles of identical, aesthetically pleasing produce, are starting to sell slightly less beautiful — but still tasty — fruits and vegetables.

LONDON — From coffee to cocoa, and almonds to blueberries, some of the world’s most nutritionally and economically vital food crops are vulnerable to declines caused by catastrophic die-offs of the bees whose pollination is key to their life cycle.

LONDON — When Gabe Brown and his wife bought their farm near Bismarck, North Dakota, from her parents in 1991, testing found the soil badly depleted, its carbon down to just a quarter of levels once considered natural in the area.

LONDON — As fears grow of a future in which antibiotics are powerless against rampaging infections in humans, experts are stepping up the call to act on what they say is a large part of the problem: overuse of the drugs on farm animals.

MUSTAFABAD, India — Khushboo Kushwaha has a few years before she will have to squat in front of a filthy, smoking open stove three times a day to cook meals for her family, as her older sister and cousins do now.

BERKELEY, California — California is cruising toward its 2020 goal for increasing renewable energy and is setting far more ambitious targets for the future. Its large-scale solar arrays produced more energy in 2014 than those in all other states combined. Half the nation’s solar home rooftops are in the state, and thousands more are added each week.