Mental health, public health, global health. New and interesting developments in technology and the arts. Meditation research. And occasionally cute animals.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
“Farm chiefs have a narrowing chance to diversify vital crops at rising threat from drought, flood and pests brought by climate change, food researchers warned on Monday.
The world’s nearly 7 billion people are massively dependent on a dozen or so crops that, thanks to modern agriculture, are intensively cultivated in a tiny number of strains, they said.
When climate change gets into higher gear, many of these strains could be crippled by hotter and drier – or conversely wetter – weather and exposed to insects and microbial pests that advance into new habitats.
“Farmers have always adapted, but the pace of change under climate change is going to be much greater than in the past. There’s going to be a real need to move fast,” said Bruce Campbell, head of a research programme called Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS)…
“There are two sorts of changes that are going to happen. One is a gradual temperature increase, the other is the extremes, extremes of heat and floods, and I think they are already here. In the meteorological records, there are so many extremes that are being beaten, although it’s very difficult to pin them to climate change.”
The adaptation strategies are being published in a compendium book, Crop Adaptation to Climate Change.”
Source: Eco-Business
(Source: plantedcity)
The weedkillers atrazine and simazine were introduced in 1958. Ten years later, a plant nursery in the US that had been regularly using the pesticides reported that they were no longer effective against a plant called common groundsel – the first confirmed case of herbicide resistance.
Half a century on, the number of known strains of resistant weeds stands at 357 and counting. “Herbicide resistance is a fantastic example of evolution in response to human-induced selection pressure,” says Stephen Powles of the University of Western Australia in Perth, who studies the problem.
After 84 days, about 280 beets were harvested. The beetroots from the urine- and urine/ash–fertilized plants were found to be 10 percent and 27 percent larger by mass, respectively, than those grown in mineral fertilizer. By subjecting some of the beets to chemical analysis, the researchers determined that all of them had comparable nutrient contents—and according to a blind taste-testing panel, their beety taste was indistinguishable. The results were published in the February 10 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
The professor I work for lectures about this. It seems gross at first, but really, is it so much worse than using cow, chicken, and rabbit poop as fertilizer?
Every nation — developed and otherwise — is dependent upon a stable agricultural sector, and climate change threatens that stability, a panel of experts said yesterday.
