My aunt Twila Hancock passed away in August. Her life was one of service and charity. She raised four beautiful children, who in turn raised children to follow in her footsteps.

The first few times around the field I watch the disk behind me carefully, being sure to make full use of its width and not miss any spots on the ground. I start off in a gear that is inevitably lower than the one I will finish in.

What if you could add an internal thermometer for each of your cows to see core body temperature changes and signatures of disease several days before a cow shows outward signs of illness? A simplified version of temperature monitoring data that some dairies are collecting is shown to the right with its associated signature health condition.

I am sitting in a large conference room in Arlington, Virginia. There are about 75 of us from four agencies and organizations. The State Department, the Defense Department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and then a collection of non-government organizations, the U.S. Agency for International Development and contractors. Our task is to examine the current status of water and land resources in Africa and the potential for greater food insecurity – a big job. In this article, I will summarize what we have learned and what we might do in the short term and long term.

One of my favourite fall pastimes is baking. I could easily spend an entire day in my kitchen whipping up treats for my family. Part of the reason is because, come September, I miss my kitchen. It is no place to be in the summer, and therefore, I spend as little time in it as possible then and must make up for it in the months to come.

Sometimes there’s just not enough room on the cover of the magazine to specifically highlight all the things I’d recommend our readers to take a look at in an issue. This is one such issue. If you don’t have much reading time, start with the cover articles. But you may also want to read these articles:

Let’s say you were granted three wishes ... would you use one of them on ‘world peace’? If somehow I was given three wishes, I think I’d use my first one to obtain a million more wishes. And then I guess the idealist in me would say ‘Yes’ to world peace. But as it turns out, I’m afraid I’m stuck being a realist. Now don’t get me wrong, I would still love to live in a land where there’s world peace.

My family has been reading about prayer for a month. Every morning we take a new scripture verse and discuss the power of prayer and the significance it plays in our lives.

Several years ago BBC News ran a story on Ian MacDonald, a quiet man with pink cheeks that is the last known Scottish crofter to swim his cattle across the sea from the Isle of Sky. Scottish crofting is a farming tradition in the highlands and islands of Scotland that dates back to the 19th century.