The Next Breadbasket. Using hand tools and draft animals, a family harvests wheat in Ethiopia’s famine-prone highlands.
Education has helped small farmers become more efficient, but wheat yields are still a third below the world’s average. With more than a third of Ethiopians malnourished, the government is courting industrial farms to help close the gap. By Joel K. Bourne, Jr. Photographs by Robin Hammond She never saw the big tractor coming. No Garden? Here Are 66 Things You Can Grow At Home In Containers. Oklahoma Will Charge Customers Who Install Their Own Solar Panels. By Kiley Kroh "Oklahoma Will Charge Customers Who Install Their Own Solar Panels" CREDIT: Shutterstock Oklahoma residents who produce their own energy through solar panels or small wind turbines on their property will now be charged an additional fee, the result of a new bill passed by the state legislature and expected to be signed into law by Gov.
Mary Fallin (R). On Monday, S.B. 1456 passed the state House 83-5 after no debate. “We knew nothing about it and all of a sudden it’s attached to some other bill,” Ctaci Gary, owner of Sun City Oklahoma, told ThinkProgress.
Fossil Fuel Monopolies. Build DIY a home with recycled material & more DIY IDEAS. Sotchi 2014. University of Sydney developing robots to automate Australian farms. The idea of an automated farm has probably been around since rural electrification started in the early 20th century.
Replacing back-breaking labor with robots has an obvious appeal, but so far cheap labor in many countries and the insistence of agriculture on being so darn rural has made automation limited in application. Despite this, Salah Sukkarieh, Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies of the University of Sydney, is heading a team working on developing robotic systems for farms with the aim of turning Australia into the “food bowl” of Asia. As has been the case for centuries, Asia needs food, but it lacks farmland. With its abundant arable land, Australia has the potential of profiting by meeting this need, but Australian labor costs are high, so automation has the potential to increase yields and improve efficiency by eliminating many manual tasks. How a Country With One of the World's Largest Economies Is Ditching Fossil Fuels.
Global biodiversity information facility. Try out the new GBIF portal!
Why not try out the new GBIF portal at www.gbif.org, which has many more features and includes lots of information about the GBIF community, including great examples of data uses in research and interesting applications? The old GBIF data portal which you are viewing now will continue to be supported until we are satisfied it can be taken down without causing major inconvenience. Be aware that the content here is static and has not been updated since the launch of the new portal on 9 October 2013. If and when a date is confirmed for discontinuing the old data portal, we will post it here with plenty of prior notice. Welcome to the (former) GBIF Data Portal Access 416,242,316 data records (363,215,360 with coordinates) shared via the GBIF network.
Explore Species. Rothschild's Water Wars, Vaccinations & Future Cities. Monsanto's airborne pesticide drones coming soon: FAA approves unmanned, poison-spraying helicopters - NaturalNews.com. (NaturalNews) The federal government has granted its approval for a new unmanned pesticide drone that reports indicate will soon start dumping chemical herbicides and other crop-related substances from the sky.
The helicopters, designed by Yamaha Corp. U.S.A., have an empty weight of only 141 pounds, according to a Federal Aviation Administration document,[PDF] and they don't require a human pilot. Multinational corporations like Monsanto can just load them up with Roundup and send them on their way. "Yamaha unmanned helicopters are designed for a wide range of industrial and research applications," reads an official brochure for the new technology,[PDF] which lists "precision agriculture," "spraying" and "seeding" as potential uses. "Your eye in the sky offers cost effective, accurate and efficient spraying with zero soil compaction," it adds. Here you can see the "RMAX" unmanned helicopter in action as it shoots chemicals down on crops: "I certainly understand their cautious approach.
Is Monsanto doing secret biowar research on Maui? Jon RappoportActivist Post Here is a stunning quote from Sherwood Ross’ 6/22/2007 Counterpunch article, “The Big Profits in Boiwarfare Research: Corporate America’s Deadliest Secret”: “A number of major pharmaceutical corporations and biotech firms are concealing the nature of the biological warfare research work they are doing for the U.S. government.
“Since their funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, the recipients are obligated under NIH guidelines to make their activities public. Not disclosing their ops raises the suspicion they may be engaged in forbidden kinds of germ warfare research. “According to the Sunshine Project, a nonprofit arms control watchdog operating out of Austin, Texas, among corporations holding back information about their [biowarfare research] activities are: