tagged w/ Cultivation
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This simple make-it-at-home hoe is a powerful device that enables you to plough vast fields in your own back yard, grow all the food and dig all the wells you need. No longer will there be any need for supermarket shopping for groceries or spending hard-earned cash on environmentally-unfriendly packs of bottled water. To top it all off, you get all your daily exercise and a trim figure, just like the cavemen.This simple make-it-at-home hoe is a powerful device that enables you to plough vast... more
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The New York Times
Photo: Bill Hammitt on his farm near Portsmouth, Iowa, where he has terraced the land, refrained from tilling and taken other measures to curb soil erosion.
PART ONE...
April 12, 2011
High Prices Sow Seeds of Erosion
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
When prices for corn and soybeans surged last fall, Bill Hammitt, a farmer in the fertile hill country of western Iowa, began to see the bulldozers come out, clearing steep hillsides of trees and pastureland to make way for more acres of the state’s staple crops. Now, as spring planting begins, with the chance of drenching rains, Mr. Hammitt worries that such steep ground is at high risk for soil erosion — a farmland scourge that feels as distant to most Americans as tales of the Dust Bowl and Woody Guthrie ballads.
Long in decline, erosion is once again rearing as a threat because of an aggressive push to plant on more land, changing weather patterns and inadequate enforcement of protections, scientists and environmentalists say.
“There’s a lot of land being converted into row crop in this area that never has been farmed before,” said Mr. Hammitt, 59, explaining that the bulldozed land was too steep and costly to farm to be profitable in years of ordinary prices. “It brings more highly erodible land into production because they’re out to make more money on every acre.”
Now, research by scientists at Iowa State University provides evidence that erosion in some parts of the state is occurring at levels far beyond government estimates. It is being exacerbated, they say, by severe storms, which have occurred more often in recent years, possibly because of broader climate shifts.
“The thing that’s really smacking us now are the high-intensity, high-volume rainstorms that we’re getting,” said Richard M. Cruse, an agronomy professor at Iowa State who directs the Iowa Daily Erosion Project. “In a variety of locations, we’re losing topsoil considerably faster — 10 to as much as 50 times faster — than it’s forming.”
Erosion can do major damage to water quality, silting streams and lakes and dumping fertilizers and pesticides into the water supply. Fertilizer runoff is responsible for a vast “dead zone,” an oxygen-depleted region where little or no sea life can exist, in the Gulf of Mexico. And because it washes away rich topsoil, erosion can threaten crop yields. Significant gains were made in combating erosion in the 1980s and early 1990s, as the federal government began to require that farmers receiving agricultural subsidies carry out individually tailored soil conservation plans.
Those plans often included measures such as terracing steep ground or sowing buffer strips with perennial grasses to stabilize areas prone to erosion, such as the edges of fields near streams or borders between crops.
Many farmers, such as Mr. Hammitt, who is on the board of the Harrison County soil and water conservation district, also do little or no plowing and leave crop residues on harvested fields, techniques that reduce runoff.
But environmentalists claim that enforcement of conservation plans by the United States Department of Agriculture is not as strict as it should be and that the gains in fighting erosion have stalled or are being undercut.
U.S.D.A. data shows that the amount of farmland erosion nationwide from water fell substantially from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, then largely stagnated.
Enforcement is needed more than ever, environmentalists say, because high crop prices provide a strong incentive for farmers to plant as much ground as possible and to take fewer protective measures like grass buffer strips.
CONTINUED...
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/13/business/erosion/erosion-articleLarge.jpgThe New York Times
Photo: Bill Hammitt on his farm near Portsmouth, Iowa, where he... more
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With the food revolution in full bloom, some have taken to bringing the fight to their own home in a literal sense. These urban farmers, or those who use their own yard, balcony, or other space to grow food, are more common than ever.
link: http://www.mastersinpublichealth.net/top-50-urban-farming-blogs/With the food revolution in full bloom, some have taken to bringing the fight to their... more
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Two groups of mice were tested with daily dosages of acetaminophen (Tylenol). One group in the study was given chicory along with the medication.Two groups of mice were tested with daily dosages of acetaminophen (Tylenol). One... more
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The world’s most popular fruit is the banana, which originated in the very-much overlooked region of Polynesia. This interesting video explores the relationship between the peoples and cultures of New Guinea, New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands and the world’s most popular fruit, the banana.The world’s most popular fruit is the banana, which originated in the very-much... more
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In an amazing propaganda segment, Fox News’ Gerald Rivera talks with an occupation soldier about U.S. support of the opium trade in Afghanistan. The soldier tells Rivera he does not like supporting Afghan opium production. The U.S., he insists, has turned a blind eye to the cultivation because it is a cultural thing. He’d rather the Afghans grow watermelons.
Is it possible the U.S. will tell the brother of Afghanistan’s U.S.-installed ruler he should get in the watermelon business?
It was reported a few months ago that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the CIA payroll and intimately involved in the opium trade Fox News and the rest of the corporate media tell us is run by the evil Taliban.
Fox News did not report that before everything changed on September 11, 2001, and before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had imposed a ban on opium production. This resulted in opium production collapsing by more than 90 per cent. It was the U.S. supported Northern Alliance that came to the rescue and began protecting the production of raw opium.
“CIA-supported Mujahedeen rebels [who in 2001 were part of the Northern Alliance] engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society,” William Blum writes in The Real Drug Lords.
Under the interim government of Hamid Karzai, opium poppy cultivation once again began to skyrocket and opium markets were restored. According to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), opium cultivation increased by 657 per cent in 2002 in relation to its 2001 level. The UNDCP estimated 2002 opium poppy cultivation would cover an area between 45,000 and 65,000 hectares. Opium cultivation in 2001 had fallen to an estimated 7,606 hectares. According to the UN, in 2006 alone Afghanistan supplied 92 percent of the world’s supply of opium (see Apratim Mukarji’s Afghanistan: From Freedom to Terror, p. 22-23).
“The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liaison with NATO occupation forces and the British military. In recent developments, British occupation forces have promoted opium cultivation through paid radio advertisements,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2007.
“Respected people of Helmand. The soldiers of ISAF and ANA do not destroy poppy fields,” the radio promo said. “They know that many people of Afghanistan have no choice but to grow poppy. ISAF and the ANA do not want to stop people from earning their livelihoods.” This is basically the same excuse used by the soldier interviewed by Geraldo.
“Senior Bush Administration officials had displayed a complete lack of interest in the Afghan opium problem ever since 9/11,” James Risen writes in State of War. “In fact, the White House and Pentagon went out of their way to avoid taking on the Afghan drug lords from the very outset of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.”
Not mentioned is the fact that more than 95 percent of the revenue generated by opium production is siphoned off to business syndicates, organized crime and banking and financial institutions.
“In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” said Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said last January. “In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.”
Former Managing Director and board member of Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read, Catherine Austin Fitts, has long alleged that the banksters launder imponderable amounts of drug money. “According to the Department of Justice, the US launders between $500 billion – $1 trillion annually. I have little idea what percentage of that is narco dollars, but it is probably safe to assume that at least $100-200 billion relates to US drug import-exports and retail trade,” writes Fitts.
The CIA has long secured the lucrative global drug market for Wall Street and for its own operational “off-the-books” purposes. “The CIA’s operational directorate, in other words that’s their covert operations, para-military, dirty tricks — call it whatever you want — has for at least 40 years that we can document paid for a significant amount of its work through the sales of heroin and cocaine,” Guerrilla News Network reported in an interview with Christopher Simpson.
The CIA has been in the drug running business since the 1950s. In Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Latin America, and Afghanistan, the CIA — also known as the “Cocaine Import Agency” — has remained at the forefront of the international illicit drug trade. The journalist Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News tied the CIA and the Contras to a large crack cocaine ring in Los Angeles. Webb paid with his life for revealing this information to the public.
None of this was mentioned by Geraldo Rivera and Fox News. Instead we are told drug dealing in Afghanistan is something engaged in by the evil Taliban (a group of religious fanatics created by the CIA and its partner, Pakistin’s ISI intelligence service).
Not that the Taliban are innocent — they have abandoned their old ways and are now exploiting the opium bumper crop to fund their operations.
“Curbing the Taliban’s multimillion dollar opium poppy business was a major goal of a military operation to seize this former insurgent stronghold,” the Associated Press reported in March. “If they destroy the crops and curb the trade, they lose the support of the population — a problem for which they have no easy solution.”
Support of the population, of course, comes in a far distant second to maintaining the addiction of Wall Street and the CIA to billions of dollars in profit.In an amazing propaganda segment, Fox News’ Gerald Rivera talks with an... more
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(Reuters) - Long the world's largest producer of opium, the raw ingredient of heroin, Afghanistan has now become the top supplier of cannabis, with large-scale cultivation in half of its provinces, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
Between 10,000 and 24,000 hectares of cannabis are grown every year in Afghanistan, with major cultivation in 17 out 34 provinces, the U.N. drug agency (UNODC) said in its first report on cannabis production in Afghanistan.(Reuters) - Long the world's largest producer of opium, the raw ingredient of... more
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"The school prepares people for jobs in California's thriving medical marijuana industry. For $200 and the cost of two required textbooks, students learn how to cultivate and cook with cannabis, study which strains of pot are best for certain ailments, and are instructed in the legalities of a business that is against the law in the eyes of the federal government.
'My basic idea is to try to professionalize the industry and have it taken seriously as a real industry, just like beer and distilling hard alcohol,' said Richard Lee, 45, an activist and pot-dispensary owner who founded the school in a downtown storefront last fall."
Is there any financial aid available?"The school prepares people for jobs in California's thriving medical... more
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