agriculture
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Peak Soil: Why Nutrition Is Disappearing From Our Food
The fountain of youth may be made of dirt. So supposes Steve Solomon in The Intelligent Gardner: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. He asserts that most people could "live past age 100, die with all their original teeth, up to their final weeks, and this could all happen if only we fertilize all our food crops differently." Read More »
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Rapid Prototyping And Tech Stewards: Reflections On Recent Field Work
Having made some excellent contacts during our recent meetings and workshops in Sri Lanka, the project team now needs to consider how those will translate into pilot projects using low cost ICTs. Read More »
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Steam Punks
How many of your possessions could you make yourself? A couple of amateur engineers are working to design and build a set of tools that would enable the self-reliant to make everything they need. Read More »
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Steve Marsh And The Bad Seeds
Wind and rain swept two Australian neighbours into a court battle about genetically modified crops, a case with implications for agribusiness, activists and pretty much everyone who eats.
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The Amish Farmers Reinventing Organic Agriculture
By studying the immune systems of plants, [the Amish] developed a technique that eliminates the need for chemicals...
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The Antibiotic Resistance Coalition (ARC)
Act now, or face catastrophic post-antibiotic era Read More »
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The Open Source Solution To The Bee Colony Collapse Problem
Last year, a third of honeybee colonies in the United States quite literally vanished. Commercial honey operations, previously abuzz with many thousands of bees, fell suddenly silent, leaving scientists and beekeepers alike scratching their heads. The reasons remain mostly a mystery for what is called Colony Collapse Disorder—a disturbing development of the drying up of beehives throughout the industrialised world. Read More »
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The Open-Source Seed Movement In Wisconsin
Farmers have traditionally gathered and saved seeds from one growing season to plant in the next. But this age-old tradition is being threatened by corporations that are increasingly restricting access to seeds through patents. Read More »
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The Sharing Economy Has Gone Big. Like, Ridge Tiller Big.
Yes, yes, we’re in the throes of a sharing economy -- hell, Uber even shared kittens on National Cat Day last month. But farm-equipment shares?...
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The Threat From Antibiotic Use On The Farm
When I was commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency’s national advisory committee recommended in 1977 that we eliminate an agricultural practice that threatened human health. Routinely feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy livestock, our scientific advisory committee warned, was breeding drug-resistant bacteria that could infect people. Read More »
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The Toxins That Threaten Our Brains
Leading scientists recently identified a dozen chemicals as being responsible for widespread behavioral and cognitive problems. But the scope of the chemical dangers in our environment is likely even greater. Why children and the poor are most susceptible to neurotoxic exposure that may be costing the U.S. billions of dollars and immeasurable peace of mind.
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The Walmartization Of Agriculture
Walmart has become an icon of the corporate rush to keep costs low and profits high, regardless of the effects on society. [...] It is this business strategy that catapulted them to be among the largest corporate interests in the world and allowed them to spread into virtually every corner of the United States. Read More »
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Think Global, Buy Local: A New Study Looks At The Impact Of Buying Local Produce On Local Economies
The motto ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ has long been a guiding tenet of the sustainable food movement. But does acting locally really make a difference and if so, what kind of difference? That’s just what a team of economists set out to explore in the study Linkages Between Community-Focused Agriculture, Farm Sales, and Regional Growth [...]. Read More »
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Two Years After The Book: “A Digital Liberia”, How Digital Is Liberia?
It’s been over two years since I first submitted the final manuscript of what would later be my first book titled, “A Digital Liberia: How Electrons, Information and Market Forces Will Determine Liberia’s Future” A lot has happened since then. In the following paragraphs, I briefly discuss the progress made in Liberia’s ICT sector since the book was published. Read More »
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U.S. Declares The Largest Natural Disaster Area Ever Due To Drought
The blistering summer and ongoing drought conditions have the prompted the U.S. Agriculture Department to declare a federal disaster area in more than 1,000 counties covering 26 states. That's almost one-third of all the counties in the United States, making it the largest distaster declaration ever made by the USDA. Read More »
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