The man who is credited with starting the Green Revolution has died. Norman Borlaug, 95 and a resident of Dallas, passed away Saturday evening. "In the early 1960s Prof Borlaug realised that creating short-stemmed varieties would leave food plants more energy for growing larger heads of grain," the BBC reported. "His high-yield, disease-resistant dwarf wheat quickly boosted harvests in Latin America, and his techniques were particularly successful in South Asia, where famine was widespread. Analysts believe the Green Revolution helped avert a worldwide famine in the late 20th century." Borlaug won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work. 

Borlaug was born in Iowa —''I was born out of the soil of Howard County,'' he said. ''It was that black soil of the Great Depression that led me to a career in agriculture" — and was a professor at Texas A&M University. He did much of his work when he organized and directed the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico. He remained concerned with food and food production until he died. "We all eat at least three times a day in privileged nations, and yet we take food for granted," Borlaug said in a recent interview. "There has been great progress, and food is more equitably distributed. But hunger is commonplace, and famine appears all too often." 

At a conference in the Philippines in 2006 he said: "We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability. Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that."

Argentine cattle are going American. "Instead of roaming freely and eating to their hearts' content, a growing number of Argentine cattle are spending a third of their lives in U.S.-style feedlots," writes Juan Forero of the Washington Post. "There, crammed in muddy corrals, they are pumped with antibiotics and fed mounds of protein-rich grain, which fattens them up fast but hardly conjures up the romantic image of the Argentine cowboy, the iconic gaucho, lassoing cattle on the high plains."

Pasture land for cattle is being turned over to corn, wheat and soy bean. And this is not helping the worldwide reputation for Argentine beef. "There's a big difference between grass-fed beef and feedlot beef," said Tomas Leclercq, who manages about 250 head of cattle for a Buenos Aires businessman and eats meat daily. "Beef raised on the plains is better, but there is less and less of it because the land is going for agriculture, so the feedlots are multiplying." Now a third of the 15 million animals slaughtered each year will come from feedlots — three times as many as in 2001.

Farmers in that South American country are switching from beef to crops because crops pay better now. Price controls have kept beef prices low. Crop subsidies make corn more affordable for the feed lots. A devalued currency makes it profitable to export cash crops.

As agricultural markets moved wildly over the last year — the same crops (or pork belly, above) were sold time and again — many said part of the problem may have been with oversight from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The markets went kaplooey and the move into Congress initially was to combine the CFTC with the Securities and Exchange and to give the new entity more powers. "Many experts have long believed that it makes no sense to have both the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission regulating markets that have become increasingly indistinguishable," writes L.A. Times reporter Jim Puzzanghera. "They have advocated merging the agencies." 

But, as Puzzanghera writes, the CFTC was under the jurisdiction of the agriculture committees in both the House and Senate. The members of Congress are reluctant to give up the power over these markets — and the contributions that come with regulating some of agriculture's giant corporations. Combining the CFTC and the SEC threatened to derail the entire reform process, so, for now, it appears the two agencies will remain separate. The Obama administration has backed off on merger plans.

"But even though President Obama had wanted to combine the agencies to close the gaps, the agriculture committees' power, many believe, was the reason the administration decided against merging them," Puzzanghera wrote. "I think they correctly judged the politics . . . that it would be a serious impediment to the passage of the overall reform bill to merge the SEC and CFTC," a Brookings Institution scholar told the L.A. Times writer.

Organic groceries cost nearly 40 percent more than store-brand items, but the market for organic foods continues to increase, a study finds.

The study by IBISWorld says the average cost of a cart of store-brand groceries in the United States is about $100, while organic groceries cost $140.

Is the price difference worth it? Consumers think so. The market for organic groceries has increased by 4 percent this year. But consumers are more apt to buy organic or natural products when the prices are comparable to traditionally produced groceries, a separate study says.

And an online publication that covers traditional production agriculture called the price difference in the IBISWorld study "staggering" and argued that there's no nutritional difference between organic and regular groceries.