Environment
After a wildfire burns a large swath across timberlands, logging companies come in to do salvage logging - they clean up the timber that has not been completely destroyed by the fire. It's a good idea to get economic benefit from devastated land and otherwise it is just rotting tinder for the next fire.
Environmentalists, who object to even the most basic forest management in order to prevent fires, hate logging - even after a fire has burned the place down. They have been raising the alarm about salvage logging because the ecological effects are...unknown.
Except they are known. A decade of…
Controlled-release fertilizers are a widely used method of delivering nutrients to nursery container crops. Controlled release is just like it sounds, the fertilizers contain encapsulated solid mineral nutrients that dissolve slowly in water which are released over an extended period of time.
Controlled-release fertilizers (CRFs)
are quite popular, but growers and researchers want ways to decrease fertilizer and irrigation expenses and reduce the impact of nutrient leaching into the environment, so a new study compares CRF placement strategies.
The study focused on determining how dissolved…
Controlled-release fertilizers are a widely-used method of delivering nutrients to nursery container crops, because they contain encapsulated solid mineral nutrients that dissolve slowly in water, which are then released into substrates over an extended period of time.
Although the use of controlled-release fertilizers is a popular and widely-accepted practice, growers and researchers are always looking for ways to get the same results with decreased fertilizer and irrigation expenses - and less nutrient leaching into the environment. A new study contains recommendations for controlled-…
Puffed rice with a bit of poison. Shutterstock
By Andy Meharg, Queen's University Belfast
There are two sides to rice: the grain that feeds half the world – and the primary carcinogenic source of inorganic arsenic in our diet.
Arsenic is a natural occurring element that is ubiquitous in the environment. It is present primarily as inorganic arsenic, which is highly toxic.
What sets rice apart is that it is the only major crop that is grown under flooded conditions. It is this flooding that releases inorganic arsenic, normally locked up in soil minerals, which makes it available for the plant…
Rabbits can strip grasslands bare and chew through young woody trees. John Schilling/Flickr, CC BY-ND
By Andrew Bengsen, University of New England
On Christmas Day 1859, the Victoria Acclimatisation Society released 24 rabbits for hunting, to help settlers feel more at home.
Given the millions of dollars in damage to agricultural productivity that ensued, as well as the impacts on biodiversity as the rabbits bred and spread to cover 70% of the continent, this could be seen as Australia’s worst Christmas present.
Now, given our current climate change commitments, controlling rabbits could be “…
An oil palm system model based on the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM) framework and called APSIM Oil Palm is aimed at helping growers of the crop maximize the yields of their plantations, while minimizing detrimental environmental impacts.
"Oil palm has become a major crop in the tropics, cultivated on more than 39 million acres of land," co-author Dr Paul Nelson of James Cook University said. "Demand for the product continues to grow, and the industry is expected to keep expanding in the foreseeable future. At the same time, there is significant concern about the…
Climate change impacts could mean uncertain transformations of global agriculture systems by 2050, according to a new paper from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Climate change has always happened - once-large cities are now desert wastelands - but it is a mistake to get too specific, like claiming that food production in Africa will plummet by 2020. Instead, it should be expected that there will be a need for increased irrigation and moving production from one region to another, the authors write in Environmental Research Letters.
The chances of getting…
Why did the earliest farmers in the Fertile Crescent, an arc of land in western Asia from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, domesticate some cereal crops 10,000 years ago and not others?
The answer seems obvious; food was a strategic resource and they chose the products that would grow the best because that meant food security. Once the basics were covered, then other crops and culture could thrive. The modern world came to be due to genetic optimization of wheat and barley and other grasses, based on a lot of trial and error.
A new study identified two key characteristics…
The Roman empire stretched over three continents, had 70 million people, and had a logistics and infrastructure system that kept them going for centuries.
They had smart agricultural practices and an extensive grain-trade network that enabled them to thrive even where water was scarce - but they knew their limits according to a paper in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.
Brian Dermody, an environmentalist at Utrecht University, teamed up with hydrologists from the Netherlands and historians at Stanford University to learn how the Romans managed water for agriculture and traded crops…
Hank |
The European Food Safety Authority, most famous for declaring that water does not cure thirst, is now thinking about how to ban acrylamide, which is a chemical that can form in some foods during frying, roasting, or baking. No, it is not due to BPA, it has been present for as long as mankind has cooked food, but it was only discovered in 2002 and then in 2010 a paper was written showing it could be harmful to rats in extremely high doses.
In July of this year, the EFSA stated that “acrylamide in food potentially increases the risk of developing cancer for consumers in all age groups", which…