China’s 2018 economic growth fell to a three-decade low, 6.4% year-on-year in the fourth quarter, from 6.5% in the previous quarter, according to official data released earlier this week.

hat would agriculture look like without livestock? It may sound like an extreme idea but it’s one farmers and all stakeholders in the entire agriculture value chain need to contemplate, says Dr. Robin White, an assistant professor of animal and poultry sciences at the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

In 2017, the amount of frozen potatoes exported worldwide totaled X tonnes, increasing by X% against the previous year. In general, the total exports indicated a prominent increase from 2007 to 2017: it volume increased at an average annual rate of +X% over the last decade.

When policymakers talk about “green jobs,” they tend to default to examples in solar power, wind and other sources of renewable energy—or perhaps manufacturing and supply chain management. They’re less likely to talk about agriculture.

Sorry to burst your bubbly, prosecco lovers, but skyrocketing demand for the sparkling wine might be sapping northeastern Italy’s vineyards of precious soil — 400 million kilograms of it per year, researchers report in a stud.

That’s a lot of soil, but not an anomaly. Some newer vineyards in Germany, for example, have higher rates of soil loss, says Jesús Rodrigo Comino, a geographer at the Institute of Geomorphology and Soils in Málaga, Spain, who was not involved in the study. And soil erosion isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it can help generate new soils to keep an ecosystem healthy.

But the amount of erosion from Italy’s high-quality prosecco vineyards is not sustainable, he says. Letting too much earth wash away with rain and irrigation could jeopardize the future of the region’s vineyards, which produce 90 million bottles of high-quality prosecco every year.  

Concerned that the recent bottle boom was taxing the local environment, a team led by researchers from the University of Padua in Italy calculated the “soil footprint” for high-quality prosecco. It found the industry was responsible for 74 percent of the region’s total soil erosion, by studying 10 years-worth of data for rainfall, land use and soil characteristics, as well as high-resolution topographic maps.

The team then compared their soil erosion results with average annual prosecco sales to estimate the annual soil footprint per bottle: about 4.4 kilograms, roughly the mass of two Chihuahuas.

Prosecco vineyards could reduce their soil loss, the scientists say. One solution — leaving grass between vineyard rows — would cut total erosion in half, simulations show. Other strategies could include planting hedges around vineyards or vegetation by rivers and streams to prevent soil from washing away.

Comino agrees, saying: “Only the application of nature-based solutions will be able to reduce or solve the problem.”

The global agriculture analytics market size is expected to grow from US$585mn in 2018 to US$1,236mn by 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.2 per cent, according to the global analytics company ReportLinker.