Plowing News
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Scarab will be at Cold Comfort 2013 displaying the Epoke Winter Maintenance Equipment
Scarab will be at this years Cold Comfort Exhibition in Manchester tomorrow and Wednesday. Products at the stand include the Sirius Gritter a Scarab Azura Flex fitted with Snow plough and a Epoke Gritter attachment. For more information please visit http://www.coldcomfort.surveyorevents.com/ or contact John Saint our winter maintenance product manager on ...
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NRDC: House farm bill should be plowed under
The U.S. House today approved a Farm Bill that cuts conservation, undermines longstanding environmental protections and denies states the right to set farm-related standards. Franz Matzner, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s associate director of government affairs, made these comments on the bill: “Once again, House Republicans are pushing an extreme agenda, this time to gut ...
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Cassava`s huge potential as 21st Century crop
Save and Grow, an environmentally-friendly farming model promoted by FAO, can sustainably increase cassava yields by up to 400 percent and help turn this staple from a poor people's food into a 21st Century crop, FAO said today. In a newly-published field guide detailing Save and Grow's applications to cassava smallholder production, FAO noted that global cassava output has increased by 60 ...
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New Ag Leader GPS System Offers Farmers Accuracy, Range, Simplicity
Ames, Iowa, January 29th, 2013 – Farmers requiring sub-inch accuracy for tiling and other precision farming operations have a new GPS option from Ag Leader Technology, Inc.: the GPS 2500B RTK Base Station. Bill Cran, Ag Leader GPS Product Specialist, said, “The GPS 2500B is a dual-frequency 900 MHz RTK Base Station for use with the field-proven GPS 2500 smart antenna.” ...
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EPUK launches website outlining the vital Importance of Healthy Soil to mark World Soil Day 2011
Healthysoils.org launches on 5th December to mark 2011 World Soil Day – an annual event set up to advocate the use and need of soils for human survival and the importance of its sustainable management. Healthysoils.org sets out the importance of soils to key aspects of human life including climate change, food, water, biodiversity and health. Soil produces food, provides nutrients, cleans ...
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Population has bigger effect than climate change on crop yields, study suggests
Population pressure will be as significant a factor as climate change in reducing crop yields — and thus increasing food insecurity — in West Africa, according to a modelling study. The authors inserted different climate change, land use, and demographic change scenarios, into an internationally validated model to estimate maize yields in Benin from 2021–2050. They found that, ...
By SciDev.Net
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Respect the Rotation: Glyphosate-Resistant Weeds One Year Later
Growers, consultants, weed scientists, researchers and government agency officials who participated in the July 2010 launch of the Respect the Rotation™ initiative have taken measureable steps toward progress in the fight against the proliferation of glyphosate-resistant weeds. But university experts still believe the system will fail if current practices continue. There is enough of an ...
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Vantage Pro2 in charge of the snow plows
If the snowplows can't get out, the folks in Katowice, Poland are in trouble. Good thing they have Adam Skowroński close by to install a Vantage Pro2 to oversee the snow-removal ...
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Manure runoff depends on soil texture
Research has documented the rise of nutrient runoff from flat agricultural fields with high rates of precipitation that adds nitrates and phosphates to waterways. These nutrients increase the amount of phytoplankton in the water, which depletes oxygen and kills fish and other aquatic creatures. While injecting animal manure slurry into the soil has been proven to be an effective way of reducing ...
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Can one-time tillage improve no-till?
A one-time tillage has no adverse effects on yield or soil properties on no-till land, according to field research conducted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Although tillage is another expense for farmers and generally increases the risk of soil erosion, a one-time tillage may be performed to correct some problem, such as a perennial weed problem. The feasibility study was conducted for ...
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No-till improves near-surface soil properties
Near-surface soil aggregate structural properties such as aggregate size distribution, stability, strength, and wettability determine the extent to which a soil will erode under water or wind erosive forces. Knowledge of aggregate structural properties is especially important in semiarid regions, such as the Great Plains, where low precipitation, high evaporation, and variable biomass production ...
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Deep ploughing reduces diversity and number of earthworms
Less invasive soil preparation methods in farming, such as harrowing, have a positive impact on the numbers, biomass, and species richness of earthworms, unlike conventional ploughing, according to new research. The long-term study compared the results of five different methods of soil preparation on agricultural land in Germany over a ten-year period. Earthworms play a major role in the ...
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Healthy soils for a healthy planet
Healthy soils are vital in a world challenged by climate change. We need to decide how best to use land to provide food for a growing population and how it can be used to mitigate the effects of manmade emissions. The quality of soil must be maintained or restored if it is to provide its essential services: cycling nutrients, water and air, supporting biodiversity and acting as a substantial ...
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Soil carbon storage is not always influenced by tillage practices
The practice of no-till has increased considerably during the past 20 yr. Soils under no-till usually host a more abundant and diverse biota and are less prone to erosion, water loss, and structural breakdown than tilled soils. Their organic matter content is also often increased and consequently, no-till is proposed as a measure to mitigate the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide ...
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Will large amounts of soil carbon be released to the atmosphere if grasslands are converted to energy crops?
Grasslands in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the United States may be increasingly converted to growing bioenergy grain crops. Questions abound regarding the fate of carbon sequestered in the soil during the CRP program by perennial grasses if the land is converted to grain crop production and the potential effectiveness of no-till production systems to conserve the sequestered soil ...
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The impact of pesticides on freshwater creatures
A recent study has concluded that, although spray drift of pesticides can have short-term effects on individual stream-dwelling invertebrates, there is no evidence to suggest that there is an impact on populations as a whole. However, to reduce the impact of the pesticides on these organisms, a no-spray buffer zone is shown to be a simple and effective measure. Pesticides play an important role ...
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Farming must change to feed the world
The world's farmers must quickly switch to more sustainable and productive farming systems to grow the food needed by a swelling world population and respond to climate change, FAO's top crops expert told an international farm congress here today. In a keynote speech to 1,000 participants at the IVth World Congress on Conservation Agriculture (CA) in New Delhi, Shivaji Pandey, Director of FAO's ...
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Harnessing carbon financing to boost sustainable farming
Some 100 experts from five continents have met to chart the way to harnessing a large new flow of funding – carbon finance – to agricultural development and to improving the lives of poor farmers the world over. Billions of dollars are available every year under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism to finance initiatives helping reduce the amount of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions into ...
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Experiment demonstrates 110 years of sustainable agriculture
A plot of land on the campus of Auburn University shows that 110 years of sustainable farming practices can produce similar cotton crops to those using other methods. In 1896, Professor J.F. Duggar at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama (now Auburn University) started an experiment to test his theories that sustainable cotton production was possible on Alabama soils if growers ...
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Irish HSA launches safety initiatives at National Ploughing Championships
The Minister for Labour Affairs Mr. Billy Kelleher T.D. today (Tuesday 23rd September) launched two initiatives aimed at reducing accidents on farms at the National Ploughing Championships in Cuffesgrange, Co. Kilkenny. The Minister was visiting the Health and Safety Authority's exhibit (Farm Safety Village) at the National Ploughing Championships where he announced that a major safety training ...
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