Since trees are an important means of absorbing carbon emissions, The Arbor Foundation, headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, engages in large-scale tree conservation projects in 27 countries, supplies trees from its Tree Nursery (arborday.org.shipping), and provides informative bulletins about trees.
Arbor Foundation projects save threatened rain forests and offer education and tree planting assistance for farm communities. For example, you can read about the Latin American farmers who grow coffee in the shade and natural nutrients of rain forest soils at shop.arborday.org/coffee. At this site, you also can purchase Arbor Day Blend coffee for yourself or as a gift. This rain-forest-saving coffee avoids the problems mentioned in earlier blog posts: "I Love Coffee, I Love Tea" and "Coffee Prices Going Up, Allowances Going Down?"
Developing hybrid trees and bushes that resist disease and insect damage, thrive in various soils and climates, and provide an abundant yield also is the work of The Arbor Foundation. One such project involves meeting the global demand for hazelnuts that now outruns the supply of this nutritious food, one that can grow on marginal soils. Although a collection of 1,899 wild hazelnut plants, some from behind the former Iron Curtain, already has been screened for this project, more plants are welcome. To learn how to help, visit arborday.org/hazelnuts.
From the Arbor Foundation, you also can obtain a copy of the publication: How to Fight the Emerald Ash Borer. The bulletin tells how this Asian insect operates and what chemical treatments prevent beetle damage. Request a copy at arborday.org/bulletins.
Showing posts with label hybrid seeds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hybrid seeds. Show all posts
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Celebrate Uplifting Efforts to Promote Self Reliance in Africa
On this Easter Sunday, what better time is there to recognize the day-to-day efforts nuns in Tanzania and Kenya make to improve the lives of women and the poor in Africa?
Sister Stella Storch, a member of an order of Dominican nuns who runs a sewing and computer program for orphans whose parents died of AIDS. malaria, and TB in Tanzania, observes, "I've been to a lot of trafficking conferences for years, and they're all rescue programs after the women have been damaged, but this is preventative of trafficking, so that makes this program unique."
Sister Storch aims to develop self-confidence and esteem in young women by teaching skills they can use to earn a living for themselves and their families. She points out how these women love their country and their families, and if they are not hungry, they won't be tempted by traffickers to leave Africa. Sister Storch works with the UN's "Empowering Women's Future AIDS Orphan Sewing Project "(unanima-international.org) that Sister Helllen Bandino of the St. Therese of the Child Jesus order helped found in Bukbuba, Tanzania 16 years ago.
Although nuns and missionaries are inspired by the teachings of Christ, they are practical rather than mystical. "There's no McDonald's for these girls to work at, says Sr. Storch. When girls are hungry, a straight seam isn't important to them, but I have to make a straight seam seem important. I tell my students, without straight seams I can't sell their placemats, napkins, clothing, and bags. To help raise the $5000 needed to buy 20 sewing machines a year from China and ship them over sea and poor roads to the western side of Lake Victoria, Sr. Storch also sells about 100 scarves she knits each year for $20 each.
The girls who board and learn at the Dominican order's motherhouse pray before class, at the end of the day, and for benefactors. When it comes to menstruation, good hygiene, and relationships with men, Sr. Storch says, I teach them "(A)ll the things a mother would normally teach a daughter."
Dominican Missionary Sisters in nearby Kenya have a different challenge, barren land unable to produce food for Nairobi's metropolitan area. One of the Sisters, Dominica Mwila, learned how to do agricultural research from her father, who directs an Agricultural Training Institute. Although the nuns had built six greenhouses to control temperatures, manage drought and rainfall conditions, and prevent loss from insects, rodents, and other wild animals, plants died of wilt disease from a bacteria infection. Research discovered hybrid tomato seeds that resisted the disease.
The Sisters invited local farmers to their greenhouses to see their healthy tomatoes and to share with them information about their farming methods. Harvests outgrew the needs of the religious community which also began to grow peppers, broccoli, maize, onions, and cabbage outdoors as well as in greenhouses. Neighbors used to a two-mile walk to the nearest market were happy to buy the nuns' surplus produce. Revenue from these sales pays salaries of tutors for 80-100 children and farmworkers who come from Nairobi's Kalinde slum for training. The Sisters encourage trainees to use the knowledge and skills they learn to start their own projects.
"Self-sustainability is tough and challenging," Sister Mwila says, but greenhouse farming is a sure way to have food and money. Alleluia!
Sister Stella Storch, a member of an order of Dominican nuns who runs a sewing and computer program for orphans whose parents died of AIDS. malaria, and TB in Tanzania, observes, "I've been to a lot of trafficking conferences for years, and they're all rescue programs after the women have been damaged, but this is preventative of trafficking, so that makes this program unique."
Sister Storch aims to develop self-confidence and esteem in young women by teaching skills they can use to earn a living for themselves and their families. She points out how these women love their country and their families, and if they are not hungry, they won't be tempted by traffickers to leave Africa. Sister Storch works with the UN's "Empowering Women's Future AIDS Orphan Sewing Project "(unanima-international.org) that Sister Helllen Bandino of the St. Therese of the Child Jesus order helped found in Bukbuba, Tanzania 16 years ago.
Although nuns and missionaries are inspired by the teachings of Christ, they are practical rather than mystical. "There's no McDonald's for these girls to work at, says Sr. Storch. When girls are hungry, a straight seam isn't important to them, but I have to make a straight seam seem important. I tell my students, without straight seams I can't sell their placemats, napkins, clothing, and bags. To help raise the $5000 needed to buy 20 sewing machines a year from China and ship them over sea and poor roads to the western side of Lake Victoria, Sr. Storch also sells about 100 scarves she knits each year for $20 each.
The girls who board and learn at the Dominican order's motherhouse pray before class, at the end of the day, and for benefactors. When it comes to menstruation, good hygiene, and relationships with men, Sr. Storch says, I teach them "(A)ll the things a mother would normally teach a daughter."
Dominican Missionary Sisters in nearby Kenya have a different challenge, barren land unable to produce food for Nairobi's metropolitan area. One of the Sisters, Dominica Mwila, learned how to do agricultural research from her father, who directs an Agricultural Training Institute. Although the nuns had built six greenhouses to control temperatures, manage drought and rainfall conditions, and prevent loss from insects, rodents, and other wild animals, plants died of wilt disease from a bacteria infection. Research discovered hybrid tomato seeds that resisted the disease.
The Sisters invited local farmers to their greenhouses to see their healthy tomatoes and to share with them information about their farming methods. Harvests outgrew the needs of the religious community which also began to grow peppers, broccoli, maize, onions, and cabbage outdoors as well as in greenhouses. Neighbors used to a two-mile walk to the nearest market were happy to buy the nuns' surplus produce. Revenue from these sales pays salaries of tutors for 80-100 children and farmworkers who come from Nairobi's Kalinde slum for training. The Sisters encourage trainees to use the knowledge and skills they learn to start their own projects.
"Self-sustainability is tough and challenging," Sister Mwila says, but greenhouse farming is a sure way to have food and money. Alleluia!
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Winners and Losers as the Climate Changes
Heat, drought, smog, and car and power plant emissions motivate a search for ways to deal with the climate changes they are causing.
Cosmetic experts, for example, have found plants that purify the skin from pollutants and protect it from sun damage. Moringa seeds from trees that purify water where they grow in Africa and Asia are the secret ingredients in Vichy's Purete Thermale, a cleansing gel that removes pollution's impurities from the skin.
Leila Janah wondered how women in Uganda managed to have lovely, unwrinkled skin despite their country's sun-soaked environment. She discovered their secret was a rare strain of African nilotica shea nuts with an extra concentration of healthy fatty acids that they purchased in a market in Gulu, Uganda. Inspired by this find, she developed a high-end beauty cream line, LXMI, named for the Hindu goddess of beauty and prosperity. Her creams contain not only organic cold-pressed butter from Gulu's shea nuts but also antioxidant fighting Ndali vanilla and Nile-grown hibiscus flowers known to plump and smooth the skin. Perhaps best of all, because LXMI is a high-priced brand that will be sold at Sephora, Janah is able to pay a dignified living wage to the women who harvest the raw materials in her creams.
Drought has launched many a scheme, including an ill-advised one to drag an iceberg south, to provide water for farmers who are said to account for 69% of the water used around the world. Pimpri Sandas in India is among the world's villages that are watering their crops with unfiltered rainwater collected in tanks on billboards designed by Kinetic. Once a tank is full, water sensor technology sends a text message to a mobile phone that alerts a tanker to pick up and deliver the water. In India, Vodafone, owner of the billboards, funds the entire process. Other businesses, such as Hindustan Unilever and Reliance Industries, have constructed dams and ponds to help communities conserve water.
What do frustrated farmers do when their crops die from drought and they go deeper into debt year after year? They move to cities where the UN estimates two-thirds of the world's population will live by 2050. This coming migration emphasizes the importance of the growing urban farming movement which, unfortunately, can produce too little and be too expensive for many displaced farmers. Nevertheless, it is worth examining the option of producing crops closer to where they are consumed. This process reduces pollution from trucking, a health benefit as well as a way to reduce climate warming carbon emissions. And urban farms also absorb rainwater and prevent sewer overflow from polluting rivers and lakes.
City farms can be as simple as outside planter boxes or black pond liners filled with soil. A variety of crops can be planted to determine which are best suited for local conditions, including natural rainfall rather than irrigation. More complicated urban farms rely on greenhouses, earthworms, compost, and recycled water, that is, aquaponics (for more details, see the earlier post, "Exotic Farming."), where filtered water from tanks of edible fish water crops. In some cases, computers monitor water levels, nutrient concentration, and ideal temperatures for different crops.
Overall, efforts to increase yields by planting crops that can withstand changes in traditional heat and rain conditions have not been promising. While cross-breeding created hybrid maize seeds that mature over shorter periods and use water more efficiently, sales are expensive and not widespread. Hybrid seeds have to be purchased each year rather than grown from the seeds of earlier crops, and since fake and falsely labeled seeds have been sold as drought-resistant, the new seeds gained a reputation as unreliable.
Cosmetic experts, for example, have found plants that purify the skin from pollutants and protect it from sun damage. Moringa seeds from trees that purify water where they grow in Africa and Asia are the secret ingredients in Vichy's Purete Thermale, a cleansing gel that removes pollution's impurities from the skin.
Leila Janah wondered how women in Uganda managed to have lovely, unwrinkled skin despite their country's sun-soaked environment. She discovered their secret was a rare strain of African nilotica shea nuts with an extra concentration of healthy fatty acids that they purchased in a market in Gulu, Uganda. Inspired by this find, she developed a high-end beauty cream line, LXMI, named for the Hindu goddess of beauty and prosperity. Her creams contain not only organic cold-pressed butter from Gulu's shea nuts but also antioxidant fighting Ndali vanilla and Nile-grown hibiscus flowers known to plump and smooth the skin. Perhaps best of all, because LXMI is a high-priced brand that will be sold at Sephora, Janah is able to pay a dignified living wage to the women who harvest the raw materials in her creams.
Drought has launched many a scheme, including an ill-advised one to drag an iceberg south, to provide water for farmers who are said to account for 69% of the water used around the world. Pimpri Sandas in India is among the world's villages that are watering their crops with unfiltered rainwater collected in tanks on billboards designed by Kinetic. Once a tank is full, water sensor technology sends a text message to a mobile phone that alerts a tanker to pick up and deliver the water. In India, Vodafone, owner of the billboards, funds the entire process. Other businesses, such as Hindustan Unilever and Reliance Industries, have constructed dams and ponds to help communities conserve water.
What do frustrated farmers do when their crops die from drought and they go deeper into debt year after year? They move to cities where the UN estimates two-thirds of the world's population will live by 2050. This coming migration emphasizes the importance of the growing urban farming movement which, unfortunately, can produce too little and be too expensive for many displaced farmers. Nevertheless, it is worth examining the option of producing crops closer to where they are consumed. This process reduces pollution from trucking, a health benefit as well as a way to reduce climate warming carbon emissions. And urban farms also absorb rainwater and prevent sewer overflow from polluting rivers and lakes.
City farms can be as simple as outside planter boxes or black pond liners filled with soil. A variety of crops can be planted to determine which are best suited for local conditions, including natural rainfall rather than irrigation. More complicated urban farms rely on greenhouses, earthworms, compost, and recycled water, that is, aquaponics (for more details, see the earlier post, "Exotic Farming."), where filtered water from tanks of edible fish water crops. In some cases, computers monitor water levels, nutrient concentration, and ideal temperatures for different crops.
Overall, efforts to increase yields by planting crops that can withstand changes in traditional heat and rain conditions have not been promising. While cross-breeding created hybrid maize seeds that mature over shorter periods and use water more efficiently, sales are expensive and not widespread. Hybrid seeds have to be purchased each year rather than grown from the seeds of earlier crops, and since fake and falsely labeled seeds have been sold as drought-resistant, the new seeds gained a reputation as unreliable.
Monday, March 30, 2015
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.")
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.")
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