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If you like Chobani Greek yogurt, Whole Foods will no longer be among the places to find it.
The retailer said Thursday that it would stop selling the popular line of yogurt after New Year's because Chobani does not label its use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), according to The Wall Street Journal. The announcement comes more than four years before Whole Foods will require GMO labeling for every product in its stores.
Chobani quickly responded to the announcement on its website in an attempt to explain why it is using GMOs in its various flavors.
"As America’s No. 1 selling Greek yogurt brand, we require a high volume of milk, and right now there is not enough organic milk available to meet our broad consumer demand," Chobani's most recent blog post reads. "We continue to stand by and work with the 875 farms that provide us with milk as they explore new feed options ... we don’t take anything for granted and are always looking for ways to improve.
"This is a far-reaching, complex industry issue that we, as a leader in Greek Yogurt, will play an active role in."
Chobani said in the same post it was using "only natural" ingredients and that its milk came from cows that were not treated with recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya didn't close the door on getting back into Whole Foods in a statement to The Verge, but Whole Foods appears ready to move on with other lines that aren't widely available elsewhere, like Maia and Stonyfield.
However, Fage Greek yogurt will remain on Whole Foods shelves even though it also contains milk from cows that were fed GMOs.
Companies continue distancing themselves from products from GMO-fed cows. Chipotle CFO John R. Hartung said in October that the company would become GMO-free some time in 2014.
Visit EcoWatch’s GE FOODS pages for more related news on this topic.
Farms with just one or a handful of different crops encourage fewer species of pollinating and pest-controlling insects to linger, ultimately winnowing away crop yields, according to a new study.
Up to half of the detrimental impacts of the "landscape simplification" that monocropping entails come as a result of a diminished mix of ecosystem service-providing insects, a team of scientists reported Oct. 16 in the journal Science Advances.
Monocrop palm oil plantation Honduras.
SHARE Foundation / Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0
"Our study shows that biodiversity is essential to ensure the provision of ecosystem services and to maintain a high and stable agricultural production," Matteo Dainese, the study's lead author and a biologist at Eurac Research in Bolzano, Italy, said in a statement.
It stands to reason that, with declines in the sheer numbers of insects that ferry pollen from plant to plant and keep crop-eating pests under control, these services will wane as well. But until now, it hasn't been clear how monocultures affect the number and mix of these species or how crop yields might change as a result.
Aiming to solve these questions, Dainese and his colleagues pulled together data from 89 studies cutting across a variety of landscapes, from the tropics of Asia and Africa to the higher latitudes of northern Europe. They tabulated the number of pollinating and pest-controlling insects at these sites — both the absolute number of individuals and the number of species — along with an assessment of the ecosystem services the insects provided.
In almost all of the studies they looked at, the team found that a more diverse pool of these species translated into more pollination and greater pest control. They also showed that simplified landscapes supported fewer species of service-providing insects, which ultimately led to lower crop yields.
The researchers also looked at a third measure of the makeup of insect populations — what they called "evenness." In natural ecosystems, a handful of dominant species with many more individuals typically live alongside a higher number of rarer species. The team found as landscapes became less diverse, dominant species numbers dwindled and rare species gained ground. This resulting, more equitable mix led to less pollination (though it didn't end up affecting pest control).
"Our study provides strong empirical support for the potential benefits of new pathways to sustainable agriculture that aim to reconcile the protection of biodiversity and the production of food for increasing human populations," Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, one of the study's authors and an animal ecologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany, said in the statement.
The scientists figure that the richness of pollinator species explains around a third of the harmful impacts of less diverse landscapes, while the richness of pest-controlling species accounts for about half of the same measure. In their view, the results of their research point to the need to protect biodiversity on and around crops in an uncertain future.
"Under future conditions with ongoing global change and more frequent extreme climate events, the value of farmland biodiversity ensuring resilience against environmental disturbances will become even more important," Steffan-Dewenter said.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Mongabay.