Following widely circulated anecdotal reports of people claiming that Tractor Supply’s “Producer’s Pride” brand of chicken feed was causing their chickens to stop laying eggs, we purchased six chicken feed products (of various brands) from Tractor Supply for the purpose of conducting comprehensive lab testing. Continue reading
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, now there’s a “barge-pocalypse” unfolding that you might find rather disturbing. This is a problem with massive global implications that very few people saw coming because barges don’t exactly attract a lot of attention. But they are critical for efficient transportation of crops and coal, and when the barges stop running, the world is in serious trouble. Continue reading
Plants were efficient absorbers of carbon dioxide during the early Miocene – a period with high levels of carbon dioxide, found a study published in the journal Climate of the Past. Continue reading
One of the biggest challenges that organic gardeners have long faced is invasive pests, which as you may well know tend to target food crops that have not been treated with toxic pesticides. But maintaining a truly organic garden is not an impossible task, especially if you are willing to take the time to employ some tried and true methods of deterring pests without chemicals. Continue reading
In the face of today`s burgeoning loss of seed diversity, the need for a doubling in food production in the next fifty years and the threatened spread of deadly food fungus has instigated seed hunters to scour world markets in a desperate search for the last varieties of wheat, rice, barley, lentils and chickpeas.
Food diversity extinction is rampant. In the USA, 90 percent of historic fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. In the Philippines thousands of varieties of rice are now shrunk to a few hundred. China has lost perhaps 90 percent of wheat varieties. This former diversity was the result of more than 10,000 years of domestication.
Without seed diversity, Continue reading
