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Social wasps are effective predators that can manage pests on two high-value crops, maize and sugarcane, a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B has found.
We tend to think of insects and bugs with the words “harmful “and “pests” unaware that worldwide, just a little bit of fraction, no more than 20 percent of all insects, cause harm to humans or damage crops.
The Earth is living, and also creates life. Over 4 billion years the Earth has evolved a rich biodiversity — an abundance of different living organisms and ecosystems — that can meet all our needs and sustain life.
"A healthy community requires healthy soil." This idea spurred a consortium of researchers, farmers, and community garden practitioners to dive into the challenges -- and opportunities -- of urban agriculture. Their efforts, now in a second year, may highlight how urban soil can be a resource fo ...
Organic farming is the buzzword in the world of agriculture. People usually believe this is a new way of farming; but it is not. Organic farming has been practiced since ancient times. In fact, earlier, there were no synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. People were more connected to nature and ...
Conflict, the climate crisis and now COVID-19 are forcing people to go hungry. One in three people (nearly 2.37 billion) didn’t have enough food in 2020 – 320 million more than in 2019, according to the World Bank’s analysis of World Food Programme data.
Reforming England’s food system could save the country £126 billion, according to a recent government-commissioned report. The National Food Strategy, led by British businessman Henry Dimbleby, proposes a raft of measures to shake up how food is produced and the kinds of diets most people eat.
Traditional accounting methods do not fully capture the externalized costs of economic activities in the food and agricultural space, and this shortcoming is becoming more apparent because climate change is intensifying the focus on sustainable development. Against this backdrop, some industry o ...
About a third of human-caused methane emissions come from livestock, mostly from beef and dairy cattle, produced in the digestive process that allows ruminants (hoofed animals including cows, sheep and goats with four-part stomachs) to absorb plants.
The interiors trend will also be seen outside this summer – bringing colour, life and beauty to our green spaces
In the mid-20th century, the so-called Green Revolution changed humanity’s relationship with agriculture. A series of technological advances in high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat seeds, along with irrigation systems and new fertilisers and pesticides – which marked the official entry of t ...
Researchers at UEA and the Earlham Institute (EI) have developed a new method to rapidly identify the sources of bee pollen to understand which flowers are important for bees.
Agricultural production benefits enormously from flower-visiting bees and other flower-visiting insects. Because of their supply of flowering plants and opportunities for nesting, hedgerows and the edges of forests represent important habitats for pollinators
Despite the central role that food plays for humanity, we as consumers tend to know very little about it: where did it come from? Who produced it? How was it made? What were the environmental and social costs of supplying it? These are questions that few of us can answer.
There are more than 28,000 species of butterflies throughout the world. These insects live and breed in diverse habitats such as the mangroves, salt marshes, lowland forested areas, wetlands, mountain zones, and in grasslands. Butterflies tend to be habitat-specific meaning that some of the spec ...
On Sunday, the chief minister of Himachal Pradesh, Jai Ram Thakur, inaugurated a nutrition garden at the Chaudhary Sarwan Kumar Himachal Pradesh Agriculture University at Palampur. The garden is spread over an area of 3,250 square meters and saplings of apple, peach, plum, apricot, pomegranate a ...
A former colleague who was a researcher and promoter of local food systems once argued that local meat markets connect children with reality. “If young people do not have a direct experience with food”, he told me, “they might think it originates on supermarket shelves.
A honey bee foraging on lavender. Photo taken by Prof Francis Ratnieks. As abundant and widespread bees, it is common to see both bumble bees and honey bees foraging on the same flower species during the summer, whether in Britain or many other countries.
In the 25 years since Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation,” much has been written about the benefits of shaking up established business practices. Even before the current pandemic, there was a growing recognition that our food systems, too, needed to be reimagined.
The oil obtained from the fruit of wild olive trees has excellent sensory, physicochemical and nutritional stability characteristics, according to an article published in the journal Antioxidants.
There are signs more actors in the food system are focusing more on biodiversity to try to make their businesses more sustainable. just-food's US columnist Victor Martino explores.
Biodiversity, which concerns the number of different kinds of of animals, plants and micro-organisms that populate vineyards, has become a bugbear in the global wine trade, as intensive farming is one of the key factors in the loss of species around the world. A recent report published by the Fo ...
Woodlands in agricultural fields surrounding a protected area maintain functionality of a wintering bird community, according to a recent study.
The World Bank today approved $120 million to help Bangladesh improve food security by enhancing climate resilience and productivity of irrigated agriculture and fisheries.
The Muresk Institute will host a free, farmer-focused event for World Soil Day this Saturday. A United Nations International Day of Significance, World Soil Day highlights the importance of healthy soil and advocates for its sustainable management.
Soil is a finite resource, meaning its loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan.As a core component of land resources, agricultural development and ecological sustainability, it is the basis for food, feed, fuel, and fiber production and for many critical ecosystem services.
Bees are among the most important creatures on the planet. They play a critical role in food production and improving biodiversity by pollinating thousands of cultivated and wild plants.
The first full assessment of risks to the world's coffee plants shows that 60% of 124 known species are on the edge of extinction. More than 100 types of coffee tree grow naturally in forests, including two used for the coffee we drink.
I started my post-graduate work on potato in 1947 at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. Growing up in Tamil Nadu, I had witnessed the damage to the potato crop by a disease called late blight (caused by Phytophthora infestans) in the Nilgiri Hills.
The UAE is crossbreeding bees to develop a resilient Queen that can endure the harsh desert climate and sustain crucial pollination rates crucial for the country’s food security, Gulf News can exclusively reveal.
A wetland without water is a melancholy sight. The fish are dead, the birds have flown and a lifeless silence hangs over the place. “Everything you see around you should be under water,” says Ecologists in Action’s Rafa Gosálvez from the lookout in Las Tablas de Daimiel national park.
Marking the start of National Biodiversity Week, Minister Pippa Hackett acknowledged the contribution of farmers in maintaining biodiversity on their land.
During Cambodia’s monsoon season, rice farmer Sam Vongsay’s backyard fills with water and the plastic trash of his houseboat-dwelling neighbours as the Tonle Sap lake grows with floodwaters from the Mekong River.
Scheme to replace EU subsidies was billed as ‘biggest change in half a century’, last year, but will now only pay farmers to improve soils
Nearly one in three people in the world did not have access to enough food in 2020. That’s an increase of almost 320 million people in one year and it’s expected to get worse with rising food prices and the war trapping wheat, barley and corn in Ukraine and Russia.