World (Food) Expo, Hybrid Crops & New Farming Practices

 Participants from 145 countries will interpret the theme, "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life," at the 2015 World Expo (expo2015.org), which is about to open May 1 and run through October 31 in Milan, Italy. At the fair, visitors will see technological advances aimed at making the food chain healthy, safe, and sufficient.

   When we were much younger, my sister and I used to collect and dry seeds from our cosmos and zinnia flowers at the end of the growing season. The next spring we planted them, just as farmers do with non-hybrid seeds for their crops. Farming with hybrid seeds is different. Developed to permit machines to harvest and husk corn, for example, hybrid seeds produce plants that are all the same height and yellow ears that are the same size with the same number of kernels per row.

    There are two reasons why hybrid seeds cannot be saved and planted again the next growing season. First, they produce variable plants with characteristics of only one parent or something entirely different from the crop from hybrid seeds. Second, since the major seed producing corporations that control over half of the global market, such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, make a major investment of time and money to produce hybrid seeds, they patent and license their seeds, sue unauthorized users for patent infringement, and, of course, charge farmers who have to purchase new seeds every year.

     The increased worldwide corporate control of soybean, corn, cotton, and other hybrid seeds has led to several developments. An Open Source Seed Initiative has been formed to make sure some unpatented seeds are available to home, organic, and other farmers who are unconcerned about, for example, a variable corn crop that has pink and yellow tassels, plants that grow to different heights, and ears that have white, red, or yellow kernels. At the same time, agonomy scientists and farmers interested in seed breeding are working to develop new varieties of unpatented, non-hybrid seeds that are well adapted to different growing conditions. To discover the best seeds to save for planting from year to year, individual farmers, on a smaller scale, might try to imitate what the University of Wisconsin's agricultural department did under the direction of Professor Bill Tracy. Students planted 200 rows of seeds from 200 different varieties of corn. After they tried bites of the crop from each row, they stored seeds from plants in the row they liked best, sent the seeds to another country with similar growing conditions, and repeated the sampling process until they found the variety that grew reasonably well, tasted the best, and had good disease resistance.

     Local soil, water, and climate conditions have a major impact on farming. When English settlers came to North America, the Indians introduced them to new crops like corn, beans, and squash and new methods of fertilizing the soil by planting seeds with fish. As water shortages escalate, in part because of climate change, there may be a need to rethink age-old farming practices. In India, where the World Resources Institute figures demand for water will outstrip supply by 50% as early as 2030, the Water Footprint Network expressed concern that the water India used to grow the cotton it exported in 2013 would have supplied 1.24 billion people (85% of India's population) with 100 liters of water every day for a year. Traditionally, India grows cotton and cereals in the drier northwestern parts of the country, where the government subsidizes the cost of electric pumps farmers use to deplete groundwater reserves. Consequently, there is no incentive for farmers to shift plantings to wetter parts of India where less evaporation would occur, to use water efficiently with irrigation, or to grow organic cotton and reduce the contamination of water by pesticides.

     Farming is changing in other places and ways. A former factory site has become a 1.5-acre micro-farm that provides job training and produces lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers for local restaurants and farmers markets. The storm-water management system the farm installed both reduced flooding and provided irrigation. Contaminated soil was covered with a layer of gravel and two feet of clean soil. By adding a greenhouse, the micro-farm could produce vegetables all year.

     To ensure a market for organic farmers, there are places where local folk sort of become shareholders who purchase a share of a farm's products when farmers need money before the planting season each spring. These shareholders receive a box of food from the farm during a 20-week growing season. In the U.S. the first box might arrive with asparagus, broccoli, and radishes in the spring and early summer; tomatoes, beans, bell peppers, cucumbers, and watermelons in summer; and pumpkins, squash, and sweet potatoes in the fall. Some farms also offer add-ons, such as eggs, honey, bread, cheese, wool, and meat, and there are farm events like potluck dinners and opportunities to work on a farm.

     To grow, I once learned that vegetables need a soil temperature of 45F degrees and overnight the temperature should not fall below 45F degrees either. In the U.S. Midwest, it is time to begin planting the crops.

(For more about farming, see the earlier blog post, "Back to the Land.")

Hunt for Moon Rocks

Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin from Apollo 11 and Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan from Apollo 17 brought back 837.87 pounds of rocks and dust from the moon; unmanned Soviet Luna missions returned with another 11.5 ounces. Where are these lunar samples?

     As a goodwill gesture, President Richard Nixon shared U.S. lunar samples with 135 countries, the 50 States, and 5 U.S. territories. You can find the whereabouts of these samples by searching "Where Today are the Apollo 11 Lunar Sample Displays?" at the website, collectspace.com. Among the samples that have been found are all from the U.S. States, except five. Wisconsin's sample is stored, but not displayed, at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

     Joseph Gutheinz, former Army intelligence officer and senior special agent in NASA's Office of Inspector General, created the Moon Rock Project at the University of Phoenix and put students to work hunting for lost moon rocks. To document search results and convey a wide variety of space-related information, including a listing of scholarships, space historian and journalist, Robert Pearlman, launched the collectSPACE website in 1999.

     Moon rocks have been found to contain three minerals: titanium-rich armalcolite, tranquillityite, and pyroxferroite. These minerals also have been found near sites hit by meteors.

     Goodwill lunar samples from at least 80 countries and territories and five states, including Michigan, are still missing. You can look for them at museums, planetariums, national archives,
ministries of culture, historical and natural history institutes, Parliament buildings, and among the homes and private papers of Governors and heads of state.

(Also see the earlier blog post, "Space Explorers.")

Word Games Lead to Reading Fun

Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, suggests introducing kids to the fun of making new words by combining names. A child named Oleg and an adult named Boris can combine to be Oloris. Billy and Pat become Bat.

     In his book, Raising Kids Who Read, Willingham notes kids will think reading is fun when their early books include rhymes. Think Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose nursery rhymes. And, if they see adults and older siblings reading, they will want to imitate them.

     Let kids know this is a classroom of students or a family that likes to read, because we like to learn (and share) new things, says Willingham. Strategically place books where kids will see them when they're bored.

     Also see earlier posts dealing with reading: "How Do You Get Boys to Read (about the World)?" "Travel the World with Summer Reading," and "A Winter's Tale."

Hearing Voices from Mexico and Russia

Journalist Sam Quinones in his book, Dreamland, challenged me to think about where we get the news of the world that we tell our children. He wrote, "Mexican media rarely covered the stories of anyone outside the upper classes...." A few days later, I read in Time magazine (March 16, 2015) that RT (Russia Today) beams President Vladimir Putin's view of the world to 700 million people in at least 100 countries. Mikhail Lesin, who was credited with inspiring the creation of RT, was found dead in a Washington, DC hotel on November 5, 2015. Although the Russian embassy claimed Lesin died of a heart attack, in March, 2016, DC's chief medical examiner said the cause of his death was blunt force trauma to the head. His body also showed injuries to his arms, legs, neck, and torso. When the US imposed financial sanctions on Putin's closest associates after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Lesin failed to comply with an order to bring home his foreign assets and those of his children.

     Quinones tells the story of the well-mannered farm boys from Xalisco, in the Mexican state of Nayarit, who are much different from the imagined image of heroin dealers. Instead of cold, conniving cartel killers or thugs; they don't use drugs; and they crave all things American: cars, action heroes, McDonald's, and girls.

     The stories Quinones finds among U.S. immigrant communities would make for an illuminating family dinner table conversation about U.S. immigration legislation and executive orders. A question like, "Did you know Cambodians don't know what doughnuts are?" could lead to the story of the Cambodian refugee, Ted Ngoy, who now runs an empire of doughnut shops in the Los Angeles area. Ngoy brought his nephew to the U.S. only after the young man escaped from a Cambodian re-education camp, walked through the jungle while being stalked by panthers, feared ambush by Khmer Rouge gunmen every step of the way, and spent a year in a Thai refugee camp.

     Russia as victim and the West as villain is an ongoing theme on RT. Protests led by Zoran Zaev in Skopje, Macedonia, were blamed on the West. Albanians who make up nearly a quarter of Macedonia's population, demanded greater rights, and Zaev's opposition demands the resignation of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevaki. His administration is being charged with wiretapping the press, judiciary, elected officials, and religious leaders. When these recordings were released, they appeared to show vote rigging and a murder cover-up.

     In February, 2015, RT viewers heard that the murder of dissident Boris Nemtsov, while he was walking near Red Square, was the work of enemies determined to discredit the Russian government. In later developments, TIME magazine (June 28, 2015) reported a Russian deputy commander of an elite Chechen battalion was charged with Nemtsov's murder. (Chechen hit men also were accused of murdering Anna Politkovskaya. See the earlier blog post, "Hope for the Future.) A re-education campaign once changed Russia's Chechnya rebels into fighters willing to follow orders from President Putin. Chechen forces took over part of Ukraine as volunteers acting for Putin, By tattooing his name and address on his arm, Lesin had avoided a similar deployment in Angola in an unmarked uniform. If his dead body were found there, Russia's clandestine involvement in this 1970s Cold War proxy conflict would have been exposed. Currently, Ramzan Kadyrow seems free to act on his own agenda in Chechnya. After Nemtsov's murder, dissidents in Russia realized they have to fear both Chechen assassins and Putin's security forces.

     Apparently Moscow also fears some of the returning volunteers, who went to Ukraine to defend ethnic Russians, consider Putin's government ineffective and corrupt. (See mention of Putin's corruption in regard to Litvinenko's assassination in the earlier post, "Hope for the Future.") Realizing these troops are combat trained and capable of leading protests, they are being closely monitored and any weapons they are trying to smuggle home are being confiscated at the border. In a reaction to Russia's aggression in Ukraine, the U.S. has plans to deploy missiles in Poland and Romania.

     At the time of Nemtsov's assassination, Russian TV viewers did not see the Moscow march protesting Nemtsov's murder, because RT showed a documentary about U.S. racial abuses. Reports of Nemtsov's murder failed to mention he was compiling information to challenge President Putin's claim that Russia was not supplying military equipment and regular Russian army troops to support separatists in Ukraine. Although 80% of older Russians receive their news from state-television, where anti-Putin activists and journalists are not allowed to appear, during Putin's 17 years in power, the younger generation has slipped away to watch YouTube and other social media outlets that show authorities with millions in assets and Russian troops seizing Crimea. Technically, we now know some of the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine were volunteers who had temporarily resigned from Chechen's regular army. Coffins returned to Russia following battles at a strategic rail hub in Ilovaisk and at Debaltseve in Ukraine. Some of Nemtsov's information came from relatives of dead Russian soldiers who had not received the compensation that they had been promised.

    Using online video to inform scattered dissidents of opposition protests is an aim of Open Russia, a foundation founded by exiled oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom Putin issued an arrest warrant for in December, 2015. Just as Putin, in his annual question-and-answer session on TV, was claiming that Russia's oil and gas based economy, which has shrunk 4.6%, would recover in two years and downplaying the conflict in Ukraine, security forces from the anti-extremism office of the Interior Ministry raided the Moscow offices of Open Russia. On May 26, 2015, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the coordinator of Open Russia and an adviser to Nemtsov, had collapsed in his office as a result of being poisoned by a toxin that shuts down a whole body in six hours. That attempt failed as did another in early 2017. Kara-Murza, who holds dual UK-Russian citizenship, believes he is targeted due to his successful effort to pass the Magnitsky Act in both the US and UK. The Act, which is named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax expert, sometimes characterized as a lawyer, who died in a Russian prison in 2009, prevents powerful Russians who abuse human rights at home from keeping their wealth in Western banks. Kara-Murza also believes athletes should attend competitions, such as the 2018 World Cup, in Russia but western democracies should not honor Putin by sending their leaders to such games.

     Russia, which planned  to deliver S-300 surface-to-air defense missiles to Tehran, along with  the United States, China, France, the UK, Germany and the European Union, negotiated what Iran calls the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to impose restrictions on Iran's nuclear program. Once Putin determined ISIS brought down Russian Flight 9268 over the Sinai peninsula in October, 2015, Russia agreed to join the US and French bombing ISIS positions in Syria. But  Russian bombers also operated against forces fighting Syria's dictator rather than ISIS. In March, 2016, Putin announced Russian troops would leave Syria before the cost escalates, but Russia would keep a naval base, air base, and air-defense systems there. In April, 2017, Syrian civilians died from chemical poison dropped on them from a Russian-made airplane which may or may not have been piloted by a Russian.

     Voices abound in this age of apps, the Internet, broadcast and cable TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, books, and movies. The more we see, hear, and read, the better we are able to help children form an accurate view of their world and ours.

Talk with the Animals (Update)

Back in August, 2012, a section in my blog post, "Talk with the Animals," was titled, Spotlighting special concerns. It raised questions about the cruel treatment of animal performers in circuses.

     In March, 2015, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced the performances of Tonka, Luna, and other elephants would be phased out in three years, by 2018. In January, 2016, the date for pulling elephants off the road and sending them to a sanctuary was updated to schedule their departure for May, 2016.

     Although baby elephants are known to stay with their mothers for up to 16 years in the wild, in captivity, baby elephants are separated from their protesting mothers at birth. During their circus training to perform tricks, they are subjected to beatings with bullhooks (sharp weapons that resemble fireplace pokers) and can fall off pedestals, break their young growing legs, and have to be euthanized. Circus elephants also suffer from tuberculosis and arthritis. In the wild they can roam 30 miles a day, but when they travel with a circus, they are shackled in boxcars.

      Can nonhuman animals, such as elephants, chimpanzees, great apes, whales, and dolphins that are "sufficiently intelligent," be considered property and held captive legally? New York's Supreme Court will have a hearing on this question May 6, 2015.

    For more about how animals in circuses and zoos and endangered and exotic species are protected and treated, see the entire blog post, "Talk with the Animals."

New York's Schools Close for Muslim Holy Days and Chinese New Year

How can you show students the importance of respecting each other's religious beliefs and national celebrations?


     Beginning in the 2015-2016 school year, New York City will add free days to its public school calendar for Muslim holy days and the Chinese New Year. By making Eid al-Adha (September 24, 2015) and Eid al-Fitr, which occurs during summer school, free days, the new calendar recognizes the size of NYC's Muslim population. Almost one million and nearly 10% of New York City's public school population are Muslim.

     New York City joins U.S. school districts in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, which already close to observe Muslim holy days.

(Religion also is the topic of earlier blog posts, "Respect the Faith" and "This We Believe.")

What If We Don't Speak the Same Language?

These days we don't need to travel to a foreign country to meet people whose first language is different from ours. Especially in college and university towns, such as where I live, students from around the world will be doing the same things we are: shopping, mailing packages at the post office, riding the bus, renting an apartment, working, attending religious services, eating in restaurants, visiting museums, doing laundry, throwing out the trash.

Smiling and saying "Hi"

Whether you come in contact with a woman wearing a scarf over her hair or a foreigner mopping an office building's hall, a smile is always an appropriate greeting.  
     When you begin to see the same person almost every day, it's easy to start saying, "Hi." One day, when I met the visiting Chinese mother, who was carrying the daughter of my neighbor, we both said "Hi" at the same time. The grandmother also raised the little girl's hand to wave at me.

Weather brings us together

Since it's been really cold here lately, it was very easy to exchange a few words with an Hispanic maintenance man when I came in shivering. He asked if I had always lived here. It gave me an opportunity to ask where he was from and if he had a chance to return there very often.
      When I came in this morning, a student from China asked me if it was cold, so he would know how to dress to go out. I suggested it was colder than China here, but he told me he had gone to college "on the same latitude." We agreed that he was familiar with this kind of weather.
     A woman from India who works at the local grocery store speaks English with a heavy accent that is somewhat difficult to understand. On a day when the temperature was six below zero, I mentioned it sure was different from India. That led to an extended conversation about her friend who was visiting from India and planned to travel on to even colder weather in Minnesota. I could tell her about a friend of mine who came to visit from Texas without an overcoat.
     When we're sweltering this summer, maybe I'll meet someone from Finland, and we can exchange observations about the heat.

Animals attract attention

It's hard to remember not all countries have the same animals. One day, when I was in the park with my granddaughter, a man pointed to a squirrel and sort of shook his head as if to ask what it was. Not all cultures have pets either. Two little Muslim boys who live across the hall from us are fascinated with our cat, Claire. When I see them, I linger outside the door to let them study Claire, while their mother and I exchange smiles.

The world watches some sporting and entertainment events

Just as it's easy to strike up a conversation with someone wearing a cap with the name of a team on it, it's easy to ask a foreigners if they've been watching the Olympics or a World Cup soccer game.
     After the Academy Awards, I knew a Mexican neighbor would be eager to exchange a few words about Alejandro G. Inarritu and his Oscar-winning Birdman film.

(For other ideas on this topic, see the earlier posts "Getting to Know You" and "How Do You Say?")