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As part of the celebration of the International Year of Soil, the New York Times published an article this week on the value of planting cover crops between regular harvests. Among the benefits: increase in soil carbon, decrease in erosion, reduction in compaction, lower fertilizer costs, and improvement in crop yields. And as I’ve pointed…
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Chris Robbins’ blog at iWeatherNet.com noted that today is the birthday of the National Weather Service. Here is how his entry begins: “The Weather Bureau, now known as the National Weather Service, was established on February 9, 1870 by the 41stUnited States Congress and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant. On March 29, 1870, the…
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There have been a number of articles published lately on the impacts of warming temperatures that are already being observed on different animal species. Yesterday I published a blog article on the impacts on ocean species. Today I will focus on the impacts of changing climate on chickens and livestock and on cats and dogs.…
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NOAA released their summary of climate conditions for January 2016 this morning. You can read the summary at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/national/201601, with a link to the full report coming out later this week. They noted that this is the lowest amount of drought in the contiguous US since 2010.
Posted in: Climate summaries -
I read an essay this weekend on a farmer and his wife in a tiny village in south India and how their lives and farming are affected by the rain there. It was a poetic description of how small farmers are intimately connected with the atmosphere and depend on it to provide the water they…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
Commercial fishing is a major source of income near the coasts across the United States. The Southeast has proportionally more coastline than any other area of the US except for Alaska, and the economy in coastal areas depends heavily on fishing. Trends that reduce the catch of seafood will have a large impact on the…
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Growing Georgia had an article this week describing the expansion of olive plantations into Florida in recent years. I’ve written previous about the development of olive groves in Georgia in this blog. Now Florida farmers, frustrated with the devastation caused by citrus greening, are looking to this new crop to help their bottom line. You…