Crops
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The New York Times posted an interesting story this week about the Jackson Family Wines farms and how producers there are dealing with drier and warmer conditions in a variety of novel ways. Their methods include using owls and falcons to scare away pests drawn by warmer weather, drones to assess crop health, and reservoirs…
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Vegetable and Specialty Crop News posted an interesting story this week about the benefit of growing spinach and other crops in high tunnels in Florida and other areas of the Southeast. The advantage to using high tunnels with hydroponic systems inside instead of open fields is that they are able to reduce the negative impacts…
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This week’s New Yorker magazine has a fascinating story about farming in urban areas without soil or natural light. The Newark farm in the story, AeroFarms, built a 12-layer crop production building on the grounds of an old steel warehouse and produces a variety of greens that they sell in New York City and elsewhere…
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National Geographic had a recent article describing changes in the way that Egyptian farmers are having to make in their traditional ways of farming to deal with changes in the flow of the Nile, the source of most water for agriculture in the country. The flow of the Nile has changed due to the building…
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The recent cold snap which we’ve experienced across the US is something we expect to see with a La Niña, and it won’t surprise me if we see a few more outbreaks of cold air this winter and even into spring as the La Niña diminishes and we go back to neutral conditions. You can…
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According to a disturbing report in Gizmodo today, “A new study published in Nature Plants demonstrates the surprisingly damaging effects of a 1930s-type drought on current US crops, and the impacts of global warming on agriculture in the years to come. Researchers Michael Glotter and Joshua Elliot from the University of Chicago ran computer simulations…
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The USDA released a map this week which shows how much cropland includes the use of cover crops. Cover crops help reduce erosion, improve soil fertility and reduce weeds, among other things. The Southeast has a higher percentage of cropland covered with cover crops than anywhere except Maryland, which encourages the use of cover crops…