Home/Posts Tagged ‘crops’
Posts Tagged ‘crops’
Nature, Videos & Documentaries, Oct 3rd, 2010,
Like something straight out of the Bible, swarms of locusts are spreading throughout the Australian states of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria. Australia’s wettest September on record followed years of drought, providing ideal conditions for a massive locust plague. It is feared that millions of euros worth of crops will be damaged in what is being described as the worst locust invasion in 75 years. From an ABC Australia report: …the Australian Plague Locust Commission is working very hard with state agencies to ensure that the resources are on the ground, and the pesticides, and the work…
Tags: australia, Australian, crops, locusts, pesticide, plague
Climate Change, Green living, Aug 25th, 2010,
Agriculture imposes a heavy and growing burden on Europe’s water resources, threatening water shortages and damage to ecosystems. To achieve sustainable water use, farmers must be given the right price incentives, advice and assistance. Food is intrinsically bound to human well-being. Besides the importance of good food for good health and the pleasure we derive from eating, agricultural production plays a vital role supporting individual livelihoods and the wider economy. But food production also consumes a lot of water – an equally vital resource. Agriculture accounts for 24 % of water abstraction in Europe and while that might not sound…
Tags: agriculture, crops, food production, growing food, irrigation, water consumption
Science & Technology, Weird Stuff, Aug 18th, 2010,
In Monday’s Guardian George Monbiot slams the concept of ‘vertical farming’ in a piece, entitled ‘Greens living in ivory towers now want to farm them too’. His main beef is that a Columbia University parasitologist named Dickson Despommier has been getting a lot of support in the green media for his idea to create skyscraper farms in densely populated urban areas like New York City, which might be a brilliant idea, but it’s a fanciful one as well. This immediately reminded me of stories about an underground indoor rice farm in Tokyo’s financial district, which turned out to be an…
Tags: crazy, crops, Despommier, Detroit, expensive, farm, farming, food, gardens, Manhattan, Monbiot, urban, vertical
Health, Nature, Science & Technology, Wildlife & Flora, Jun 27th, 2010,
How many of you have an outdoor garden? Okay, and how many of you use Roundup weed killer? Although Roundup has a reputation of being one of the top weed killers on the market and much safer than other chemical alternatives, there are still some stubborn weeds out there that are resistant to Roundup and have actually evolved over the past 34 years (since Roundup’s introduction). Unfortunately, this weed evolution has forced farmers (and others) to resort to some outdated and environmentally unsafe weed killing methods, particularly in the southern states. Right now, there are at least 10 weed species…
Tags: adapt, chemicals, crops, environmental, evolved, farmers, hazard, herbicides, Monsanto, resistant, Roundup, seeds, stubborn, threat, weed killer, weeds, wildlife
Green living, Health, Science & Technology, May 31st, 2010,
You’ve probably heard all the reports about how Climate Change will damage our crops and livelihoods via drought, flooding (from rising sea levels), and so forth. However, I’ll bet you haven’t heard about the latest threat climate change poses to crops: decreased nutritional value. A study, published in Science magazine, shows that increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere could reduce crop protein by 20%. Scientists tested the 2 main types of soil nitrogen available to plants (nitrate and ammonium) and the affect they had on 2 major types of plants (monocotyledons and dicotyledons) that were exposed to an atmosphere…
Tags: ammonium, carbon dioxide, Climate change, co2, crops, global warming, nitrate, nutritional value, protein, science, soil nitrogen, study
Science & Technology, Wildlife & Flora, May 16th, 2010,
A study in China has shown that cotton genetically modified to fight one pest can result in population explosions of other competing insects. From a Nature News report: In 1997, the Chinese government approved the commercial cultivation of cotton plants genetically modified to produce a toxin from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that is deadly to the bollworm Helicoverpa armigera. Outbreaks of larvae of the cotton bollworm moth in the early 1990s had hit crop yields and profits, and the pesticides used to control the bollworm damaged the environment and caused thousands of deaths from poisoning each year. Mirid bugs,…
Tags: bugs, China, Chinese, cotton, crop, crops, genetically modified, GM, insecticides, mirid, pest, pests, study
Climate Change, Feb 20th, 2010,
Typhoons in October devastated agriculture and caused heavy damages to infrastructure in the Philippines. Now a drought is destroying crops and threatening electricity supplies in the Southeast Asian nation, the New York Times reports. Nearly 400,000 acres of farmland have already been affected, and agriculture officials expect the drought to continue, perhaps until July. –New York Times The government of the Philippines is responding with monetary aid to farmers and fishermen; water rationing, drilling wells and even cloud-seeding. An AFP article credits the weather phenomenon of El Niño as the cause of the drought in the Philippines: El Nino is…
Tags: agriculture, crops, drought, El Nino, New York Times, Philippines, rice
