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POPSJaffa (Yafa) former Arab city. Until the mid-19th century, Jaffa's orange groves were mainly owned by Arabs, who employed traditional methods of farming. Jaffa's citrus industry began to flourish in the last quarter of the 19th century. Shamuti oranges were the major crop, but citrons, lemons and mandarin oranges were also grown.
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POPSGovernment asks court to block wider testing for mad cow Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.Other variations of Prions Diseases include Kuru, Alzhiemer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, BSE,Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, CJD,Creutzfeldt Jakob's Disease, Alpers disease, Fatal Familial Insomnia, Scrapies Sheep Disease, TSE,Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies, CWD Chronic Wasting Disease, Transmissible mink encephalopathy, Feline spongiform encephalopathy, Ungulate spongiform encephalopathy,
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POPSFather of India's Green Revolution Prepares for Evergreen Revolution
“In every crisis is an opportunity” Swaminathan is once again agitating for revolution -- this time a perpetual one. In the early ‘60s, India grew 12 million tons of wheat every year. Starvation was rampant and the country imported much of its food. Swaminathan, an agricultural geneticist, developed new strains of high-yield wheat for his country and the programs that led to an India that exports food. Today, India grows some 70 million tons of wheat and has become the world's second-largest wheat producer. He says that today India has reached a plateau in production and productivity because a problem of under investment in rural infrastructure. His M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture & Rural Development follows a pro-nature, pro-poor and pro-women orientation to a job-led economic growth strategy in rural areas through harnessing science and technology for environmentally sustainable and socially equitable development.
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POPSChange We Can Stomach--I Big Ag on the downslide? Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer. In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown.
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POPSBiofuel Craze Could Starve Millions Joachim von Braun, director general of the U.S.-based International Food Policy Research Institute supports a moratorium on grain- and oilseed-based biofuels but not for sugar-cane-based fuels. Sugar-cane is the source of many sweeteners used in breakfast cereals and soft drinks. We should start seeing those prices begin to shoot up. I looks like we are just going to have to find another alternative to the biofuels sources.
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POPSTough grasses may be key to new carbon sink Grasses like this may be part of a solution, where it will be need to be part of a new approach to agriculture, which will involve a combination of measures, that will allow us to be more compatible with the environment. Things like putting back into the soil what is taken out, with fewer chemicals like pesticides, and herbicides, which nature cannot digest, being left behind. If we try and compete with nature, we lose, we need to learn to work with nature, and the resources it has available - how nature and mankind should be on the same team, but we spend too much time banging our heads against the immovable object that is nature. We often seem to be trying to replace what is natural with our own ideas, but the time that we can run a show as well as nature, is a long way off. It's about time we tried to learn.
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POPSForgotten Inventor - The Fresno Scraper Fresno Scrapers served the US army in WW-I. The two-horse model retailed for $28, yet today's bulldozer blades are its direct offspring. The gigantic scraper-carryall earth mover is its grandchild.
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POPSFood shortages are an indictment When the developed nations begin to struggle imagine the plight of those in places like Darfur. These poor people have been totally reliant on the goodwill of the developed countries - now what?
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POPSHome Brew for the Car "Mr. Butterfield thinks that the MicroFueler is as much a game changer as the personal computer. He says that working with Mr. Quinn’s microelectronics experts — E-Fuel now employs 15 people — has led to breakthroughs that have cut the energy requirements of making ethanol in half. One such advance is a membrane distiller, which, Mr. Quinn says, uses extremely fine filters to separate water from alcohol at lower heat and in fewer steps than in conventional ethanol refining. Using sugar as a feedstock means that there is virtually no smell, and its water byproduct will be drinkable." "E-Fuel has bold plans: It intends to operate internationally from the start, with production of the MicroFueler in China and Britain as well as the United States. And Mr. Butterfield is already at work on a version for commercial use, as well as systems that will use feedstocks other than sugar."
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POPSJapan Acknowledges Sea Shepherd’s Defense of the Whales
"It is truly regrettable that we could not carry out the project as planned," said Agriculture Deputy Minister Toshiro Shirasu. "Sabotage by activists is a major factor behind our failure to achieve our target," a fisheries agency official said. “The number of whales taken was low of course because of the sabotage," said Shigeki Takaya, a Fisheries Agency spokesman for whaling. "We're angry that they can carry out such dangerous activities, and it doesn't bother them." Peter Hammarstedt, the second officer on the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin was amused at that comment. “Of course it did not bother us that the number of whales killed was low and we are proud that we stopped them from slaughtering the rest, and we intend to return again next season to save more whales. Our crew did a wonderful job this year and we are pleased that we have cost the Japanese whalers so much money and trouble. We hope to hurt them even harder next year,” he said.
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POPSFood Riots Erupt Worldwide The real culprits are the economic ideologies of free trade and interest driven growth which, masquerading as science, drive disastrous policy decisions.
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POPSSubsidies And High Crop Prices
Dooley says the net impact is bad for the food producers he represents. "For most American farmers, they're producing commodities—they're seeing their best years ever. But for farmers that have to feed grains and corn to livestock, they're seeing very tough times.... The policy is having a significant adverse impact on a significant sector of our agriculture, while I admit it is helping some farmers." These higher costs are also seen in consumers' grocery bills, and that has made ethanol subsidies an issue in Washington. Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York this month proposed legislation that would end the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff* as a way to stop a spike in milk prices. "There are a lot more milk consumers than ethanol producers in New York. He's hearing an earful from his constituents," Griswold says of Schumer. *The federal government gives preferential treatment to domestic, corn-based ethanol in the form of a 54-cent tax on imported Brazilian ethanol.
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POPSIs your lawn making you sick? Organic Gardening has a feature on all the health and environmental dangers connected with the extensive use of chemicals for lawn care, which are common in the U.S. These include weed killers, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers.
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POPSPERMAculture: Path to Sustainable gardens
Some of permaculture's key guidelines for designing a garden (or a lifestyle) include: * Honor the health of the system and of all components above their productivity; favor slow changes and low levels of work and input and output over the drive to maximize production, which pushes the system out of balance. * Maintain closed-loop cycles of all materials to keep the system in balance; what we might call waste is re-imagined as a surplus resource, to be used as an input into another process. * Designate zones of more intense and less intense energy use to maximize efficiency and minimize wasted labor and resources. * Build in redundancy -- each element has many functions, and each function is performed by many elements -- to ensure stability in the system. * Do not use stores of natural capital to sustain ongoing processes, but tap them for the extra energy needed when generating a structure or system or putting a process into action. * Use natural proces
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