Posts Tagged ‘crops’

New Report Shows that Climate Change “Literally Affects People in Their Backyards”

It’s in the papers and on TV. It spreads across the Internet (including this very post), and it is finding its way into the classroom. Global climate change is nothing new. And it certainly isn’t going away. Not yet, anyway.

Food Security and Wild Animal Protection: Zimbabwe Struggles to Find the Balance

Around Matabeleland elephants have broken into the crop fields and eaten the crops being grown by villagers. As well as elephant, wild pigs and baboons from Hwange National Park have begun to roam into agricultural land, causing havoc wherever crops are grown.

American Corn Declines as Global Crop Research is Boosted

We’ve got used to roller-coaster oil prices, although it doesn’t stop panic buying at the pumps when gas prices are projected to rise, but roller-coaster food prices are something that hasn’t been seen in most of the developed world for many decades.

Starvation rising as recession takes hold says UN

The recent fall in grain prices across the developed world may have given the impression that food security isn’t a problem – but it is. There are more people not getting enough to eat than there were a decade ago.

Federal Judge: GMO’s Do Not Belong in Natl. Wildlife Refuge

In a huge break for the United States’ anti-GMO movement, a federal judge ruled that the US Fish & Wildlife Service should not have allowed genetically modified crops to be planted within a Prime Hook, a national wildlife refuge in Delaware.

The suit, filed by the Center for Food Safety, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, and the Audubon Society in Delaware, challenged that the US Fish & Wildlife Service knowingly put habitat at risk when it allowed farmers to plant GMO’s inside the 10,000-acre wildlife refuge. The results were better than anyone expected.

Are Vegetables as Good for You as They Used to Be?

According to research published in The Journal of HortScience, produce now lacks not only the taste, but also the amount of nutrients it had just 50 years ago.

Vegetables today are larger, but contain more “dry matter” which dilutes the concentrations of minerals.  This results in 5% to 40% less magnesium, iron, calcium, and zinc.

Selective breeding to increase crop yields has let to genetic dilution, which has also in turn caused declines in protein and amino acid levels in produce.

Because of the increased use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, crops are now harvested so quickly that the plant has less time to absorb nutrients either from synthesis or the soil.

Ocean Levels Rise as Drought Grips California

Global warming forces natural resources into unnatural conditions, and the people who rely on them are similarly forced into unnatural positions

What Peanut Butter Cost America

The environmental impacts of the peanut butter recall will take years to unravel.

Vietnam: Industrial Tiger or Food Security?

Vietnam faces a stark choice. Its farmlands are shrinking as government policy to achieve ‘industrialised nation’ status by 2020 continues. But national food security has always been a focus of Vietnamese political and cultural life. How is it to balance these two competing aims. One answer is through the use of atomic energy.

Researchers: Cut Carbon Dioxide by Dumping Crop Waste into the Ocean

A map of proposed places to bury crop wastes in the Gulf of Mexico, as suggested by a new research paper.

It’s a decidedly low-tech way to deal with a 21st century problem, but a newly published paper argues that the world can cut carbon dioxide emissions up to 15 percent a year by taking the crop waste leftover after the harvest and dumping it into the deep ocean.

Stuart Strand of the University of Washington and coauthor Gregory Benford of the University of California at Irvine argue in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that such a reduction is possible by dumping 30 percent of world crop residues at least 1,500 meters deep in the oceans. The method would lock up the carbon in the crop waste deep underwater for thousands of years, the authors said.

Do British Bananas Show Global Warming is Accelerating?

Perhaps by 2050 we’ll all be growing bananas in our energy efficient homes?

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