Swapping Pesticides with Beetles Could Put Money in Farmers' Pockets

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By Wei Zhang. Reblogged from Agrilinks. Every time you see a ladybug—also known as the ladybird beetle—you should tuck it in your wallet as a lucky charm to bring prosperity, according to the folklore of many countries. There’s a grain of truth in the old stories. Research shows that each ladybird in a cotton field in…
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Joint forces against highly invasive Fall Armyworm Pest

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Reblogged from plantix. PEAT, CABI and ICRISAT launch the first live tracking tool for Fall Armyworm (FAW) in India. The Fall Armyworm is a very invasive pest which is highly destructive to more than 80 plant species. The pest is native to America and has conquered the African continent in 2016. Since then, it has…
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The Bugs Are Coming, and They’ll Want More of Our Food

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Reblogged from The New York Times Climate change is expected to make insect pests hungrier, which could encourage farmers to use more pesticides. Ever since humans learned to wrest food from soil, creatures like the corn earworm, the grain weevil and the bean fly have dined on our agricultural bounty. Worldwide, insect pests consume up to…
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Why African farmers should balance pesticides with other control methods

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By Esther Ndumi Ngumbi. Reblogged from The Conversation. Insect pests cause almost half of the crop losses in Africa. If the continent is to feed its growing population, farmers must find ways to control them. Pests account for high losses in other developing regions too. For smallholder farmers in particular, pest management needs to be affordable, safe…
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Open source seeds

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“Open source software is accompanied by a licence that encourages people to share it and create new programs with it, and at the same time prevents anyone from releasing a program that uses the code under any other form of licence. The creativity embedded in the code cannot be privatised. Kloppenburg and a group of…
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