Vegetable farmers in Morlaix, France have taken to the streets to protest falling prices on their products, and they are not joking around. In an attempt have their cause recognized, they've begun dumping artichokes and manure everywhere and have burned down tax and insurance offices.

A farmer in western Pennsylvania found 150 marijuana plants growing right alongside corn on his farm, police say. The farmer won't be charged because investigators are saying he didn't plant them himself.

Asteroid tails! Clean bacteria! Dinosaur gore! See-thru snails! Desert farming! Traffic math! Moon craters! And toothy fish that can't be killed! It's your Thursday Science Watch, where we watch science—with rancor!

Good morning. Have you eaten yet? Good. Let's talk cockroach farming.

Trend science is a delicate art. The progression of a group or a place or an activity from "strange" to "offbeat" to "trendy" to "hateful" is one that can often only be precisely decoded by experts such as ourselves, or whatever other assholes have opinions on the internet. For example: we know for sure that urban farming is now a trend that can be classified as fully fauxhemian, and irrationally mocked accordingly. But what about kids who go to college, and then become farmers, out there in the country, where the farms are? Are they proper targets for our self-loathing turned outwards, yet?

Tired of hearing your hippie friends cluck their tongues at you for eating "unhealthy" regular produce instead of the pricier organic stuff they buy? I'm a super-strict vegetarian who lives in California, and those people even get on my nerves. From now on, send anyone who chastises your non-organic ways to these two new studies that say organic food may not be so wonderful, despite the fact that it's oftentimes more expensive and revered by the Bikram set.

Remember how last week we were talking about the "post-pointless" era of journalism, in which any and all experiences no matter how banal can be packaged as journeys of discovery and wonder, and sold to superficially pop-intellectual sites like Slate and Salon as something that appears just meaningful enough for a bored office worker with an advanced degree to justify wasting ten minutes of her life reading it, only to be left with the mental equivalent of the junk food hangover we get from feasting on an entire bag of unadorned Tostitos™ brand white corn chips?

Here's the problem with Rick Perry's campaign: He and his SuperPACs have all this money, but no one really likes him anymore or has any interest in re-liking him. Where's all this money he duped everyone out of early on supposed to go? As of now it looks like he'll just keep saturating Iowa teevees with his same heartland-y ads over and over.

Attention pig farmers! Thieves who may or may not be operating in "well-organized rings" have been stealing hundreds of pigs owned by your Minnesota and Iowa brethren—most likely to sell as emotional-support animals the pork chops and hams of the future. Your porcine pals could be next!

A rash of inexplicable watermelon explosions has stricken melon farmers in eastern China. Experts are baffled! Is this the start of the coming apocalypse?

The trend of fashionable young Brooklynites either A) leaving Brooklyn to go work/ live on/ start a farm or B) participating in unlikely farming-related activities right here in the city (including, but not limited to: keeping of livestock, harvesting of chicken products, planting of gardens, or sociopathic devotion to neighborhood farmer's markets and their accoutrements) is so old, in trend years, that it's already been dissected from every possible angle by the New York Times, which is, itself, always several light years behind, in trend years. The trend has now moved to a post-trend media outlet unconcerned with being judged by those who define themselves by their participation in trends: the New York Post.

[A villager rides a bullock cart in Kosi village, more than 100 miles from Patna, India. Image via AP]

Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert, a terribly silly person best known for his "terror babies" warning, has devised an ingenious plan to eliminate welfare forever! Recipients can promise to never joins the welfare rolls again, in exchange for some farmland.

The Iowa farm that recently recalled 500 million eggs tainted with salmonella, Wright County Egg, over a two-year period detected salmonella in 426 samples at its facilities, according to investigators. But the FDA doesn't require notification of salmonella detection. Nice.

The two Iowa farms that produced the half billion recalled salmonella eggs have been visited by investigators from the Department of Justice and the Food and Drug Administration's criminal division this week. Good thing, because those farms are disgusting.

Two Iowa farms behind the massive salmonella egg recall have been investigated by federal officials, and what they found is pretty gross: Eight-foot tall piles of manure as well as rodents, maggots, and wild animals mingling with hens. And more!

Nepalese women shelter themselves under umbrellas while picking weeds from a paddy field south of Khatmandu today. Image via AP

The Supreme Court overturned an injunction against planting genetically modified alfalfa seeds made by evil Frankenfood conglomerate Monsanto. The Agriculture Department says the seeds should be approved "in time for next spring's planting." Trust in Monsanto. What could go wrong?

French farmers transformed part of the Champs Elysees—the iconic Paris street on which the Arc de Triomphe sits—into farmland in an attempt to promote the struggling farm industry. Click through for more photos of French people having fun.

A new USDA survey finds that less than 1% of US farms are organic—meaning that the carnivore locavore yuppie fantasy that it's okay to eat meat as long as it comes from one of the few "good" farms is an unsustainable argument, in the Kantian sense. There will never be enough "good" farms to fulfill the demand for meat, so only forsaking meat altogether is a viable, ethical, environmental stance, in accord with the categorical imperative (universalization formulation). Which, not for nothing, is exactly what Jonathan Safran Foer says in his new book, so, we know he's a precious twee Brooklyn writer and all, but give up some props, along with that ham sandwich. Everyone knows you got to stay off that pork.