Brazil Farmers Shown How To Profit By Conserving

Talk of ecological diversity or saving rare species does not fly very far in Mato Grosso. The state is Brazil’s top soy producer, churning out an annual harvest of about 18 million tonnes. Fields of emerald green line the highways, stretching out to horizons so flat they look drawn with a ruler. The crops have

Putting Fertilizer Where It’s Needed

“We’re trying to match the nutrient requirements to the production.” – WADE BARNES, FARMERS EDGE Last year, about eight million pounds of phosphorus fertilizer – roughly equivalent to 150 semi-truckloads – were not applied on 750,000 acres of cropland in Western Canada. It wasn’t needed. Credit Farmers Edge and variable rate technology for the cost


Climate Report Shows Australia Getting Warmer

Australia’s top scientists have released a “State of the Climate” report at a time of growing skepticism over climate change as a result of revelations of errors in some global scientific reports. The scientists said their monitoring and research of the world’s driest inhabited continent for 100 years “clearly demonstrate that climate change is real.”

Arctic Seed Vault Sets Record, Over 500,000 Samples

A“doomsday” vault storing crop seeds in an Arctic deep freeze is surpassing 500,000 samples to become the most diverse collection of food seeds in history, managers said on Thursday. Set up on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard two years ago, the vault aims to store seeds of all food crops deep beneath permafrost to wi


Wild Plants Sought For Climate Traits

Farm experts plan to track down wild relatives of crops such as rice or wheat with traits that make them able to resist global warming in a project costing perhaps $50 million, a leading expert said March 9. “The wild relatives of cultivated crops … are largely uncollected or conserved in gene banks,” said Cary

Eat Local To Sustain Farmers, Conference Told

Lori Stahlbrand is on a 96 per cent mission. It’s estimated only four per cent of the food Canadians consume is grown and sold through local farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture projects and the like. The rest comes from mainstream retailers, mostly supermarkets. As a result, there’s a huge potential market for the local food economy


Australia Bush Fires Could Worsen

Australia faces a possible 300 per cent increase in extreme bushfires by 2050 unless world leaders can agree to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions, a new report said Jan. 28. The report, commissioned by Australia’s firefighters and environmental group Greenpeace, said the failure of UN climate talks in Copenhagen to agree on a treaty to

Whither The Prairie Climate?

“The evidence is pretty clear to my mind that global warming is underway, and greenhouse gas emissions are causing some changes in the climate.” – BRUCE BURNETT, CWB Adapting to climate change will be tough, that’s for sure. It might be easier if Prairie farmers knew exactly what to plan for, but one thing is


Could We Have One Too?

JOHN MORRISS EDITORIAL DIRECTOR “Pickles, no garlic.” That was one of the items on the shopping list, an unusually long one before Christmas when those of us blessed to live in Canada need to worry about having too much food, not too little. Among the brands was one which was almost a dollar cheaper, which

Largest U. S. Farm Group Rallies Against Climate Bill

The largest U. S. farm group will oppose aggressively “misguided” climate legislation pending in Congress and fight animal rights activists, said American Farm Bureau Federation president Bob Stallman Jan. 10. In a speech opening the four-day AFBF convention, Stallman said American farmers and ranchers “must aggressively respond to extremists” and “misguided, activist-driven regulation … The