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For 50 years, farmers, scientists, and homeowners have looked for a way to get rid of kudzu. The invasive plant native to Japan grows at such an astounding rate that people in the southern U.S. joke about closing their windows at night to keep it out of the house. Another invasive species should teach us to be careful what we wish for. Megacopta cribraria, an insect that hitched a ride to Atlanta on a plane from Asia in 2009, eats kudzu. The kudzu bug could eat away a third of the kudzu covering several states within a decade.
“I’m all for it,” says Keith Brouillard, owner of Raleigh, N.C.’s Carolina Forestry, a consulting group that helps manage timber land for private owners. “Kudzu is a nuisance and almost impossible to get rid of.” The vine is virtually impervious to herbicides, chain saws and even fire. Its roots can weigh 300 pounds and run 12 feet deep.
But the bug is also chewing up soybean stalks, reducing some yields recently by as much as a quarter, according to entomologists at the University of Georgia.
“Disappearing kudzu is a cultural problem,” says John Shelton Reed, a sociologist and essayist on Southern life. “But disappearing soybeans is an economic problem.”
Researchers are looking for ways to protect soybean crops from Megacopta cribraria while still searching for a species that will kill kudzu and leave crops alone. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: University of Georgia at Griffin)
The Inca civilization grew a variety of crops in the Andes Mountains, despite the rough terrain and scant rainfall, using sophisticated agricultural methods developed over centuries. Those methods faded away when the conquistadors took over, partly because so many Incas died of war and disease, and also because the invaders insisted on doing things their own way. But the hillside terraces and irrigation systems used by ancient Incas were the most efficient way to grow crops in the Andes.
The terraces leveled the planting area, but they also had several unexpected advantages, Kendall discovered. The stone retaining walls heat up during the day and slowly release that heat to the soil as temperatures plunge at night, keeping sensitive plant roots warm during the sometimes frosty nights and expanding the growing season. And the terraces are extremely efficient at conserving scarce water from rain or irrigation canals, says Kendall. “We’ve excavated terraces, for example, six months after they’ve been irrigated, and they’re still damp inside. So if you have drought, they’re the best possible mechanism.” If the soil weren’t mixed with gravel, points out Kendall, “when it rained the water would log inside, and the soil would expand and it would push out the wall.” Kendall says that the Incan terraces are even today probably the most sophisticated in the world, as they build on knowledge developed over about 11,000 years of farming in the region.
The rainfall is still scant and the hills are still steep, and there is renewed interest in employing the ancient and diversified crops and the traditional ways of farming in the Andes. Read all about it at Smithsonian. Link
(Image credit: Cynthia Graber)
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Sunflowers were grown as a food crop thousands of years ago in North America, although they looked very different from modern flowers. Sunflower seeds were exported to Europe in the 16th century as ornamental plants. But it took Russian intervention to make it the huge oil-producing plant it is today.
During Lent, the Russian Orthodox Church forbad its adherents from consuming oil. However, the oil of the sunflower was not on the prohibited list and the Russian people jumped on Peter’s bandwagon wholeheartedly. By the third decade of the nineteenth century sunflower oil was manufactured in Russia on a large and highly lucrative commercial scale.
Read about how the sunflower made its way back to America as a crop in this post at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Allen Hsu)
This 1948 advertisement for a “radioactive soil conditioner” promises a 20% increase in your tomato, beet, lettuce, and carrot crops. What could possibly go wrong? Link -via Boing Boing
Many of my Facebook friends are virtual farmers on FarmVille but I wonder how many of them would choose to run a real agricultural operation. The MyFarm project offers 10,000 subscribers the opportunity to participate in the running of a real-life working farm in Cambridgeshire, U.K. for £30 per year. The Wimpole Estate, owned by England’s National Trust, currently receives 250,000 visitors per year and has a rich farming history going back centuries. Farmer subscribers will vote on how the farm is run and get to choose crops, livestock, facilities investments, and machinery. It is hoped that the project will raise awareness about how agriculture works.
Betsy Mason of Wired Science has a really neat post about how farming in various countries create strange agricultural landscapes as seen from above. This one above is from Libya:
The lonely green circles in this image are center-pivot fields 0.6 miles in diameter in southeastern Libya near the Egyptian border. Known as the Al Khufrah Oasis, the fields are one of Libya’s largest agricultural projects. Virtually no area of Libya receives enough rainwater to grow crops, and the fields here are irrigated with water from an underground aquifer. The image was made by astronauts aboard the International Space Station on Oct. 28, 2004.
In 1967, Colorado State University graduate student David Cheever wrote a term paper on the Colombian cut flower industry. In 1969, he went to Colombia and started a business. Things took off from there.
It’s not often that a global industry springs from a school assignment, but Cheever’s paper and business efforts started an economic revolution in Colombia. A few other growers had exported flowers to the United States, but Floramérica turned it into a big business. Within five years of Floramérica’s debut at least ten more flower-growing companies were operating on the savanna, exporting some $16 million in cut flowers to the United States. By 1991, the World Bank reported, the industry was “a textbook story of how a market economy works.” Today, the country is the world’s second-largest exporter of cut flowers, after the Netherlands, shipping more than $1 billion in blooms. Colombia now commands about 70 percent of the U.S. market; if you buy a bouquet in a supermarket, big-box store or airport kiosk, it probably came from the Bogotá savanna.
The Colombian flower industry has its problems, like hard work and low wages, pesticide dangers, and environmental impact -not to mention the effect it has on the US flower industry. On the other hand, there is a movement to certify fair labor practices, and working with flowers offers workers economic independence and possibly a better life than they would have otherwise. Smithsonian has the story of how your flowers are grown, picked, and shipped. Link
(Image credit: Ivan Kashinsky)
How did the sport of competitive giant pumpkin-growing get so big? I mean, it’s really big!
1. Chris Stevens of New Richmond, Wisconsin grew a pumpkin this year that weighed in at 1,810.5 pounds -considerably bigger than the previous world-record pumpkin that weighed 1,725 pounds. The big pumpkin was weighed at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Stillwater, Wisconsin Minnesota last weekend. How did he grow a pumpkin that big? Stevens has a 10,000-square-foot pumpkin patch, in which he grows only one pumpkin per vine. He shades the fruit from the sun, and feeds the vines cow manure, fish emulsion and seaweed.
2. Competitive pumpkin growing really began with William Warnock of Ontario. He grew the Rennie’s Mammoth variety of pumpkins, which were billed as capable of growing to over a hundred pounds. However, Warnock’s pumpkins were much bigger. In 1900 and 1904 he produced fruits that weighed over 400 pounds! His 403 pound world record set in 1904 stood for 76 years. See Warnock’s pumpkins here.
3. The most common variety of pumpkin grown for world-record competitions is the Atlantic Giant, which produces the largest fruit of any plant in the world. The variety was first cultivated by Nova Scotia farmer Howard Dill in 1976. It was Dill who finally broke Warnock’s big pumpkin record in 1979, and grew record-setting pumpkins for several consecutive years afterward. The Dill family still sells the record-breaking seeds.
4. During the last few years of the 20th century, the competitive pumpkin community was rocked by cheating, scandals, and infighting -enough to power a soap opera. The main governing body of the competitions was the World Pumpkin Confederation. A split in the membership led to the creation of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, which now oversees official weigh-ins.
5. The first pumpkin that weighed over a thousand pounds was grown in 1996 by Paula and Nathan Zehr of Lowville, New York. Their record-breaking pumpkin weighed an astounding 1,061 pounds, which won the couple a $50,000 prize for reaching the 1,000-pound milestone. Since then, half-ton pumpkins have become “common”. The world record for large pumpkins has been broken every year this decade, except for 2008.
The city of Detroit has shrunk to a population of only 900,000 people -half as many as in the 1950s. Empty houses and businesses are apparent in every part of the city. City officials are weighing different plans for what to do about Detroit’s long-term health. One idea is to return the outer parts of the city back to agriculture. Residents are already getting started in gardening.
Now the seeds of a remarkable rebirth are being planted – literally. Across Detroit, land is being turned over to agriculture. Furrows are being tilled, soil fertilised and crops planted and harvested. Like in no other city in the world, urban farming has taken root in Detroit, not just as a hobby or a sideline but as part of a model for a wholesale revitalisation of a major city. Some farms are the product of hardy individualists or non-profit community groups. Others, like Hantz Farms, are backed by millions of dollars and aim to build the world’s biggest urban farm right in the middle of the city.
Mark Covington, 38, is one of those 21st-century pioneers, though he stumbled on his role almost by accident. Finding himself unemployed after losing his job as an environmental engineer and living back with his mother two years ago, he started tidying up an empty lot near his Georgia Street home, planting vegetables and allowing local people to harvest them for free. An orchard of fruit trees followed, as did a community centre – made by converting a pair of empty buildings – which keeps local youths off the streets. The result is a transformation of the area around his childhood home. Local kids come to movie nights held amid the crops. Residents love the free, fresh food in an area where no major supermarkets exist. The Georgia Street Community Garden is never vandalised.
Link (with video) -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
Wired takes a look at new technologies for delivering nutrients to our bodies, from meat grown in laboratories instead of farms to ocean-grown crops. And there’s a possibility we won’t even need food in the future! Scientist Robert Freitas imagines humans ingesting nanorobots that could supply each cell with energy as it is needed.
This would only replace food’s caloric aspect, so we’d still need to take vitamin and nutritional supplements in order to provide the body with new matter as cells die off, according to Patrick Tucker, director of communications for the World Future Society. Still, there’s a certain cold comfort in knowing that if worse comes to worst, nanotechnology might give us a food pill that, taken every 10 years or so, would power our bodies if the planet loses the ability to do so — or if we’re forced to leave the planet, as Stephen Hawking suggests.
(image credit: Flickr user GE Healthcare)
Archaeologist Timothy Matney and colleagues excavated an ancient tablet from the Assyrian Empire and managed to decipher it to reveal … a deportation program from 3,000 years ago!
So far, the team has deciphered lists of names of 144 women on the tablets who were likely employed by the palace as agricultural workers or laborers at its granary.
Yet while the tablets were written in the Late Assyrian language, the women’s names are not Assyrian, Matney said.
That means the women may have been from local indigenous populations, or part of a mass relocation of people conquered by the Assyrians in another part of the empire, Matney said.
"The Assyrians deported large numbers of people—hundreds of thousands—from one part of the empire to another in order to break up local power structures and to move agricultural workers where they needed them," he said.
"It’s an intriguing possibility that these women may have been one group that was involved in these deportations."
(Photo: University of Akron)
The following is reprinted
from The
Best of The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
Dr. Norman Borlaug. Photo: khalampre
[Flickr]
Ever heard of Norman Borlaug? Most people haven't, yet he's credited
with a truly amazing accomplishment: saving more life than anybody else
in history.
THE POPULATION BOMB
 In
his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb
, author and biologist
Paul Ehrlich wrote that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over."
Ehrlich's chilling book predicted that a rapidly growing world population
would soon lead to massive worldwide food shortages, especially in third-world
countries. World population was just over 3.5 billion at the time and
was increasing at a faster rate than food production. "In the 1970s
and 1980s," Ehrlich wrote, "hundreds of millions of people will
starve to death." Most experts agreed with Ehrlich's dire predictions
... but they hadn't anticipated Dr. Norman Borlaug.
(Photo: Center
for Conservation Biology, Stanford University)
FARM BOY
Borlaug was born in 1914 and grew up on a farm in Saude, Iowa. In 1942
he graduated from the University of Minnesota with PhDs in plant pathology
and genetics. In 1944 he was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation, a
global charitable organization, and the Mexican government to head a project
aimed at improving wheat production in Mexico. His assignment: to develop
a more productive strain of wheat that was also resistant to stem rust,
a fungal disease that was becoming a major problem in Latin America.
Borlaug chose two locations with an 8,500-foot altitude difference for
his testing. He grew and crossbred thousands of different strains of wheat,
and worked with the latest fertilizers, looking for plants that could
grow in both environments. Reason: they had to be able to grow anywhere.
Over the next several years Borlaug was able to develop hardy, highly
productive strains, but he found that the tall wheats he was using would
not support the weight of the added grain. So he crossed the tall wheats
with dwarf varieties that were not only shorter but had thicker, stronger
stems. And that was his breakthrough: a semi-dwarf, disease-resistant,
high-output wheat. He worked incessantly to get the seeds distributed
to small farmers throughout Mexico, and by 1963 Borlaug's wheat varieties
made up 95 percent of the nation's total production, with a crop yield
that was more than six times greater than when he'd arrived. Not only
could Mexico stop importing wheat, they were now an exporter - a huge
boost to any nation's nutritional and economic health, but especially
to an underdeveloped one. And now Borlaug wanted to take his high-yield
farming global. He wanted, he said, to secure "a temporary success
in man's war against hunger and deprivation."
ANOTHER VICTORY
In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation sent Borlaug to Pakistan and India,
two nations with severe hunger and malnutrition problems. Borlaug's help
was resisted at first; there was cultural opposition to new farming methods.
But when acute famine struck in 1965 (1.5 million people would die by
1967), the barriers came down. And the results were incredible: by 1968
Pakistan, which just a few years earlier relied on massive grain imports,
was entirely self-sufficient. By 1970 India's production had doubled ad
it too was getting close to self-sufficiency.
At four o'clock in the morning one day in 1970, Margaret Borlaug got
a phone call. She raced out to the fields and informed her husband, already
hard at work, that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. "No, I haven't,"
he said. He thought it was a hoax. But he had indeed won it for having
saved the lives of millions - perhaps hundreds of millions - of people
in India and Pakistan and for the message it had sent to the world. "He
has given us a well-founded hope," the Nobel committee said, "an
alternative of peace and of life - the green revolution."
NOTHING ESCAPES CONTROVERSY
Borlaug had also been working on other grains, such as corn and rye,
and in the 1980s began developing more productive strains of rice to increase
production in China and Southeast Asia. He was setting up similar programs
in Africa, but ran into a major hurdle: environmentalists opposed his
methods. Among their charges: spreading the same few varieties of grains
all over the planet is harming biodiversity; huge farms are benefiting
from his high techniques and killing off the small farmer; inorganic fertilizers
used in the Borlaug method are harmful to the environment; and genetically
engineered food is unnatural and potentially dangerous.
"Some of the environmental lobbyist are the salt of the earth,"
Borlaug said," but many of them are elitists. If they lived just
one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty
years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation
canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying
to deny them these things." He admitted that he would rather his
work benefited small farmers, but added, "Wheat isn't political.
It doesn't know that it's supposed to be producing more for poor farmers
than for rich farmers." Supporters argue that Borlaug's high-yield
method has actually been a boon for the environment, saving hundreds of
millions of acres of wild land from being turned into farms. The controversy
continues, but none of it has stopped Borlaug from his mission.
KEEP ON PLANTING
 In
1984, with the help of Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa, Borlaug
set up the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA), training more than a million
farmers throughout Africa. Result: using Borlaug seed and methods, cereal
grain yields have increased from two- to four-fold.
As of 2005 - at the age of 91 - Norman Borlaug is still at it. He continues
to work with Mexico's International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center,
still heads the SAA, runs research programs, teaches young scientists,
gives lectures, and of course, still works in the field.
Over his 50-plus-year career he has been credited with saving as many
as a billion people from starvation, and has received numerous international
awards. In May 2004, he was presented with another: at St. Mark's Episcopal
Cathedral in Borlaug's college town of Minneapolis, he was shown their
new "Window of Peace." The Minneapolis Star Tribune
described the event: "He gazed upward to see the sun shining through
a 30-foot-tall stained glass window. There - along with depictions of
Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and other modern-day peacemakers - was
a life-size likeness of Borlaug, holding a fistful of wheat." |
|
 |
The article above is reprinted with permission
from The
Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling,
and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written
over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the
book.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom
Reader Institute.
 |
| Norman Borlaug was featured on Penn and Teller's BS on genetically modified food: [YouTube Link] | |
The banana we know and love today actually suck when compared to the one our grandparents ate. That cultivar, called the Gros Michel, was bigger and tastier but alas it was hit by a blight called the Panama disease and went extinct by 1960.
Now, the banana we all eat, a variety called the Cavendish, may face the same fate: Panama disease, caused by the fungus Fusarium, is back and spreading fast!
Panama disease – or Fusarium wilt of banana – is back, and the Cavendish does not appear to be safe from this new strain, which appeared two decades ago in Malaysia, spread slowly at first, but is now moving at a geometrically quicker pace. There is no cure, and nearly every banana scientist says that though Panama disease has yet to hit the
banana crops of Latin America, which feed our hemisphere, the question is not if this will happen, but when. Even worse, the malady has the potential to spread to dozens of other banana varieties, including African bananas, the primary source of nutrition for millions of people.Panama disease is so virulent that a single clump of dirt tracked in on a tire tread or a shoe can spark a country-wide outbreak.
Previously on Neatorama: We’re Bananas About Bananas!
