Agricultural Super Ducks
Agricultural super ducks? You may think that the entire phrase is flawed. Ducks waddle around in parks, not on farms. You probably have never thought of them as being particularly ‘super’ as they paddle around the park pond, searching for scraps of bread. However, you’d be mistaken, as I was, for the humble duck is…
Radio initiatives aiding remote African farmers
Information and communication technology has advanced rapidly in the past few decades. Many of us now take connection to the internet and easy access to information for granted. However, in remote parts of the world, even access to electricity is infrequent and unreliable, and communication technology is developing in a way that reflects this. In…
India’s Food Security Challenges
Agriculture is very important to India, employing 55% of its population and providing 16.5% of its annual GDP. The industry as a whole is worth US$ 17.5 million alone in exports. However, it’s not all plain sailing, with low productivity and regional groundwater depletion currently threatening Indian agriculture. Climate change and the demands of an…
Why we should all be batty about agriculture
Bats are perhaps one of the best kept secrets of agricultural success. As nocturnal fliers they are often ‘out of sight, out of mind’, but insectivorous bats (Chiroptera) provide us with a natural, eco-friendly, and free pest control solution, saving North America alone an estimated $3.7 billion every year. Good news then? Not so much…
The problems of achieving food security for 1.6 billion people in China
It is predicted that the population of China will stabilise at 1.6 billion within the next two decades. In order to feed this many people, crop production will need to increase by 2% each year to provide the estimated 580 million tonnes of grain that will be required. Mingsheng Fan and colleagues have published a…
The seed social network
A new study by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) looking at cowpea crop diversity following floods and drought in Mozambique has shown that seed sharing networks are a valuable way to maintain, and often improve, crop diversity. Informal sharing and trade of seed within and between local communities in the Limpopo River Valley,…
Clash of the food security threats
“On a planet with sufficient food for all, a billion people go hungry.” The Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change As the global population grows, it is not just one factor that threatens food security but several interconnected threats that will continue to make it difficult to produce enough food for everyone. The combination…
Cassava – another superhero unmasked?
For those of you keeping a watchful eye on the plant health news feed, you may have noticed a recurring theme around the topic of cassava crops in East Africa over the last few days. Cassava, a staple crop across sub-Saharan Africa, has been the subject of a well-established battle against Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD),…
Ozone pollution negatively affects crop yields
It is predicted that, as levels of the air pollutant, ozone, continue to increase, they will be highest in areas of the world with the most rapidly increasing population levels. This is bad news for crop growers in developing countries, as it has been found that high concentrations of ground-level ozone can have a negative…
Which is the world’s worst agricultural pest?
They have caused famines that killed millions; they have precipitated the release of hundreds of megatonnes of carbon; they even turned the UK into a nation of tea-drinkers. And today they are still destroying around 40 per cent of the crops that we grow worldwide. Agricultural pests and diseases have a lot to answer for.