We talk to the developers of one of Australia's biggest, privately-owned non-mining microgrids, that will power a massive almond farm and slash diesel use by 90 pct. Plus news of the week.

George McMaster's farming career started with milking eight cows in a byre, relying on his eyes to spot any health issues in his cattle. He still watches his now-300-strong herd, but via a feed from an AI camera in the milking parlour at the farm near Islandmagee in County Antrim. The device uses an algorithm which assigns each cow its own ID, records a short video of the animal every day, analyses it and flags any changes - often before they are visible to the human eye. For the third generation farmer, it is "absolutely incredible to move from all hand-done to sitting on the phone, watching what's happening outside". Making everyone happy It is just one example of how technology is changing the traditional profession. George's son Jack, who is taking over the farm, jumped at the chance to get involved with the CattleEye app when a local developer approached him. He, too, is astonished by the potential. "There's cows there we would never have thought of as lame when we were just watching them every day, but whenever the camera's watching they're picking them up so much earlier, any emergencies that we have, to check cows before they...

What if the next big change in Indian agriculture came from a woman flying a drone over the fields of her village? From spraying crops with precision to monitoring their health, agricultural drones are opening up new possibilities for farming, and FlySakhi – Drone Queens of Bharat is ensuring rural women are part of this transformation. Under the theme ‘Empowering Women Entrepreneurs through Agricultural Drone Technology’, the initiative has trained its first cohort of 25 women, equipping them with the skills to operate drones and build their own agri-tech enterprises. Led by the World Cooperation Economic Forum (WCOOPEF) and the Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI), with TiHAN–IIT Hyderabad as its technology partner and Syngenta India as its CSR partner, the programme combines technological training with entrepreneurship to help women turn their skills into sustainable livelihoods. Marking the United Nations’ International Year of the Woman Farmer 2026, FlySakhi is also a flagship initiative under the Civil Society Resilience and National Awareness Mission (CSRNAM) 2026. Binod Anand, secretary general of CNRI, speaks to CE about taking agricultural technology beyond the fields and into the hands of rural women, creating new livelihood opportunities and helping them become entrepreneurs in their own...

For decades, success in agriculture has largely been measured by crop yields. Government policies have encouraged farmers to grow high-yielding crops such as paddy and cotton through assured procurement, mechanisation and the easy availability of agricultural inputs. These measures have benefited farmers by improving their incomes and strengthening the country’s food security. However, the continuous cultivation of high-yielding crops, coupled with the excessive use of chemical fertilisers, has degraded soil health. Many of these crops also require large quantities of water. In a strong El Niño year marked by severe droughts, this poses a serious threat to agriculture, particularly in rainfed regions. Building agricultural resilience has therefore become increasingly urgent. Such resilience comes not from depending on a single crop, but from crop diversity, something scientists and policymakers are increasingly recognising. Yet this principle has long been understood and practised in the rainfed regions of Karnataka’s Raichur district through the indigenous mixed-cropping system known as Akkadi. Under Akkadi, farmers cultivate as many as eight crops in the same field. Main crops such as red gram, sorghum or pearl millet (bajra) are interspersed with other crops, including green gram, cowpea, moth bean, gongura (mesta), castor and field beans. Crop choices are...

A century ago, growing coffee outdoors in Palermo was a losing battle against the cold. Today, a Sicilian family is harvesting coffee cherries from plants growing in the open air. On the outskirts of Palermo, Sicily, the Morettino family is growing Arabica coffee outdoors, harvesting about 100 kilograms of coffee cherries annually that produce just over 15 kilograms of roasted beans. It is a tiny harvest by global standards, but it carries a much bigger message. As the Mediterranean warms, crops once confined to tropical regions are beginning to find a foothold farther north. Yet Sicily’s coffee experiment comes with a catch. The same climate change making the plants possible could make the water they need harder to secure. Palermo once could not keep coffee alive The significance of the Sicilian harvest becomes clearer when viewed against Palermo’s past. In 1905, the city’s Botanical Garden tried growing 25 coffee plants outdoors, but the plants failed to survive winter temperatures that fell below −3°C. Another attempt in 1911 also failed when a wave of freezing weather destroyed the plants. More than a century later, coffee is growing outdoors in the same city. And the story of how it got there stretches...

A US beef industry group campaigned against established science on the role of cows in climate change, a new study says. Examining documents from 1986-96, US researchers found the group's tactics…