Learn how to choose and use inexpensive cuts of grass-fed beef, free-range chicken and pastured pork for better nutrition and out-of-this-world flavor.
Joan Salmonowicz tells readers what to feed chickens, how to mix your own chicken feed, including buying mixed ration feed in bulk, feed ratios, and common supplements.
This October Earthship Biotecture will be joined by a team of student soldiers to build a unique ‘Earthship flower-design’ community centerinMalawi,Africa.
Working together with,Empower Malawi, to gather volunteers and funds necessary to build two rooms, or petals, of the eight-room community center over the course of ten days.
The project, Kapita Earthship Community Centre, is to be the first of its kind in the area and will become a sustainable development epicenter for 38 villages and over 5,000 rural people in South East Mzimba district East Mzimba district in Malawi.
The Kapita Earthship Community Centre is to house a secure community bank, a library, a dispensary for medical services and supplies, administration offices,classrooms for teaching children and adults, and a local food bank to develop food security. All of these are that do not exist for the people of Mizimba, Malawi and the surrounding areas.
Zinc deficiency affects around 17% of the world’s population, mostly in developing countries. In Pakistan, the most recent national nutrition survey indicated that over 40% of women are zinc deficient. Stunted growth and development in children, increased susceptibility to infections, and complications during pregnancy and childbirth are just some of the consequences of zinc deficiency. Potentially leading to severe illness and death, this seemingly invisible deficiency has a negative economic impact on the family, the community, and the region more broadly.
So in May 2017 a group of researchers from the University of Central Lancashire started investigating whether a newly developed strain of biofortified wheat could increase dietary zinc intake in Pakistan by integrating the wheat into normal eating habits, and is being used is used to make chapattis – a staple food in the brick kiln communities of Peshawar.
Biofortified crops are developed using conventional plant breeding techniques, like cross-breeding standard varieties with their wild relatives over several generations. This means that biofortified crops are often more resilient to pests, diseases, higher temperatures and drought, as well as having higher micronutrient concentrations, such as zinc.
The trials were successfully completed in February this year, and the team are heading out to Pakistan this month to meet with research partners. The next steps are laboratory analysis, data entry and statistical analysis, and the team hope they will show improved zinc status associated with consuming bio-fortified zinc flour.
Scientists have shown that low levels of pesticides can impact the foraging behaviour of bumblebees on wild flowers, changing their flower preferences and hindering their ability to learn the skills needed to extract nectar and pollen.
Bees and other insects pollinate many of the world’s important food crops and wild plants, and have been threatened in recent years.
The study is the first to explore how pesticides may impact the ability of bumblebees to forage from common wildflowers in the UK that have complex shapes.
Kleiman compared mango trees at a local farm in Homestead, Florida. One plot of trees had weeds growing around them. The other plot was maintained and weed-free.
The pollinators preferred the trees with the weeds. In turn, the trees benefitted and produced more mangos. In fact, there were between 100 to 236 mangos on the trees with weeds, compared to between 38 to 48 on the trees without weeds.
Kleiman points out findings apply to mango trees, but also to all of the roughly 80 percent of flowering plants of Earth, including fruit trees and all flowering vegetable plants like tomatoes, beans, eggplants and squash. She also hopes this information can help farmers save time and money, as well as reduce the use of chemical pesticides.
China Plans to Feed 80 Million People With ‘Seawater Rice’
Jinghai district in northern China is hardly a rice-growing paradise. Located along the coast of the Bohai Sea, over half of the region’s land is made of salty, alkaline soil where crops can’t survive. Yet, last autumn, Jinghai produced 100 hectares of rice.
Known as “seawater rice” because it’s grown in salty soil near the sea, the strains were created by over-expressing a gene from selected wild rice that’s more resistant to saline and alkali. Test fields in Tianjin—the municipality that encompasses Jinghai—recorded a yield of 4.6 metric tons per acre last year, higher than the national average for production of standard rice varieties.
China has been studying salt-tolerant rice since at least the 1950s. But the term “seawater rice” only started to gain mainstream attention in recent years after the late Yuan Longping, once the nation’s top agricultural scientist, began researching the idea in 2012.
Yuan, known as the “father of hybrid rice,” is considered a national hero for boosting grain harvests and saving millions from hunger thanks to his work on high-yielding hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s. In 2016, he selected six locations across the country with different soil conditions that were turned into testing fields for salt-tolerant rice. The following year, China established the research center in Qingdao where Wan works. The institute’s goal is to harvest 30 million tons of rice using 6.7 million hectares of barren land.
Article goes on to speak about rising sea levels and how salt-tolerant rice will have big implications for coastline countries in the coming decades.
