Author: MATT CAWOOD
Via: Farm Weekly - online
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has placed 2009 as the warmest year in the Southern Hemisphere since records began 130 years ago, and the past decade as the warmest globally.
Globally, 2009 tied with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 as the second warmest year on record after 2005, according to the GISS analysis of planetary temperatures.
The decade from January 2000 to December 2009 was clearly the warmest since modern instrumentation was introduced in 1880.
"There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Nino-La Nina cycle", said GISS director James Hansen.
"But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated."
Over the past three decades, according to the GISS analysis, the global average temperature has increased 0.2 degrees Celsius a decade.
The Australian Bureau of Meterology (BoM) is waiting on the results of a similar analysis by the UK Met...
Author: Matt Cawood
Via: farm Weekly
THE business of growing, supply and consuming food in the United Kingdom creates about 30 per cent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report.
Joint contributors to the study, "How Low Can We Go", the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN) and WWF, say that driving down this emissions profile will need to go further than just technological solutions, but also address how and what the UK population eats.
Two-thirds of UK emissions are related to the food supply chain, the study found, with the remaining third due to land-use changes like deforestation.
The authors considered all food-related emissions sources, including those generated from food imports into the UK. About three-quarters of land-use change emissions were considered to come from the production of beef and sheepmeat, mostly overseas.
For the UK food industry to play a meaningful role in the UK's desire to cut total emissons by 80 per cent by 2050, the report's authors argue that...
Author: MATT CAWOOD
Source: http://fw.farmonline.com.au
SOME believe that dwindling supplies of potable water is humanity's great resource challenge; others think it is the imminent prospect of "peak oil".
But an equally important milestone in modern history will be an inevitable tightening of global supplies of phosphorus.
Phosphorus has underpinned the leaps made in agricultural productivity since World War II, and the world's economies and population levels have become dependent on a continous supply of the element.
Unlike nitrogen, which can by synthesised from the air, or the use of renewable energy to substitute for fossil fuels, there is no substitute for phosphorus. All the world's phosphate fertilisers come from mined phosphate rock, making it a finite resource.
Various analyses suggest "peak phosphorus" - the point at which supply falls behind demand - will occur around 2040, with all currently known reserves potentially exhausted within 50 to 100 years.
However, University of Technology Sydney researchers Dana Cordell and Stuart White warn that for most countries, a phosphorus squeeze...
Please find below the link to a usefull report about the world agricultural supply and demand estimates issued by United States Department of Agriculture.
http://www.wellgrain.co.uk/news.asp?id=9.
Courtesy of: http://www.wellgrain.co.uk...
Author: TRAVIS KING
DESPITE the sharp rise in sheep export prices over the past eight months, demand for Australian sheep in the Middle East is holding strong.
And this demand is not expected to drop off according to Livecorp livestock services manager Peter Dundon.
Mr Dundon, who is based in Bahrain, said if Australian producers were debating whether they should be sticking with sheep or not, he would strongly suggest they do.
"While there is some resistance to the higher prices, importers are still keen to source Australian sheep simply because of the food security issue," Mr Dundon said.
"While the fact that there are higher prices has seen some importers look to northern Africa to source sheep, no one can guarantee supply like Australia can.
"Bahrain demands 2500 sheep per day and Australia supplies 95 per cent of that market.
"If the trade to Bahrain stopped tomorrow, a whole lot of people would not have access to fresh meat.
"Somalia is probably our biggest competitor and are...
Author: MATTHEW CAWOOD
Source: Farmonline
CLIMATE change has a speed: about 420 metres per year. That's the average rate at which temperature zones will shift across global landscapes during this century, according to research led by the Carnegie Institute in the United States.
It is also an estimate of how quickly plants and animals will need to move to stay within current climatic zones, and an indication of the pressure on agriculture to adapt as seasonal conditions shift.
Recently published in the scientific journal Nature, the research attempts to predict "temperature velocities" as a way of expressing how climate change will influence plants and animals adapted to certain climatic zones.
Such work is not entirely new, according to Professor Barry Brook, who occupies the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at Adelaide University, but it does provide a useful picture of how climate change may advance across landscapes - including farmland.
Unlike plants and animals, which must move or evolve to survive climate shifts, agriculture...
Author: Gregor Heard
Source: http://fw.farmonline.com.au
WITH a deregulated grains market, farmers are increasingly realising the vital importance of sound market intelligence when making marketing decisions.
If the first year of deregulation was the year of on-farm storage, the 2009 season saw a huge increase in the number of brokers and analysts providing that crucial information to growers.
The trend is only likely to increase, as farmers seek to find a marketing edge by assessing the micro and macro trends emerging within the market.
From supply and demand balance sheets within key domestic use regions of Australia, to a snapshot of the international situation, many farmers have decided it is worth the price of hiring an expert in these areas.
Contacts are also crucial, and middlemen, linking up producers with reliable domestic end-use customers, are also regarded as being worth their cut.
The other major growth area in 2009 was specialised marketing products, from Elders Toepfer’s on-farm storage accreditation program, to GrainCorp’s initiative to link warehoused grain with...
Author: COLIN BETTLES, Farmonline.com
FOR the first time in the history of our planet, one billion people are starving and another two million are undernourished.
The starvation and malnourishment is occurring at horrific levels in third world Africa, while Asia is also suffering greatly from the lack of basic life elements.
The advancement and enrichment of modern agricultural production techniques offers sustainable solutions to these problems.
The practical knowledge and know-how needed to stimulate agricultural output in the areas at greatest risk, is immediately ascertainable from a number of willing sources.
The World Bank estimates it will cost about $10 billion per year to make a significant dent in the problem.
Governments around the world, including ours in Australia, have made repeated public commitments to increase foreign aid and assistance programs to help achieve these critical goals.
Between them, these Governments can afford to kick in the $10b now.
However, for reasons known only to those in charge, political inertia continues to entangle the solution, while the starvation...
AUSTRALIA will record its third warmest year on record in 2009, and the planet its fifth, according to data collected by the World Meteorological Organisation.
The annual analysis found the 2000s were warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s, challenging claims that the globe has cooled in recent years.
Only North America had a cooler-than-average year in 2009. Large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are expected to have their hottest year ever.
Arctic sea ice - often at the centre of the debate about global warming - is at its third lowest level since detailed measurement began 30 years ago. The lowest level was in 2007.
''Every summer the amount of Arctic ice is getting very low,'' World Meteorological Organisation secretary-general Michel Jarraud said in Copenhagen.
In Australia, the year was marked by three ''exceptional heatwaves'', including the wilting south-eastern summer that culminated in the Black Saturday bushfires that killed 173 people.
Victoria recorded its highest ever temperature - 48.8 degrees.
Heatwaves...
Author: JACQUI FATKA
IN light of ongoing debates on global food security, agricultural sustainability and climate change, it is important to recognise the benefits biotechnology brings to world agricultural production.
According to several research summaries released by PG Economics, those impacts are significant.
Biotech crops have contributed to significantly reducing the release of greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural practices.
In 2007, this was equivalent to removing 14.2 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or removing nearly 6.3 million cars from the road for one year.
The greenhouse gas emission reductions are derived from two principle sources: reduced fuel use from less-frequent herbicide or insecticide applications and reduced energy usage in soil cultivation from the use of no-till and reduced-till farming systems.
From 1996 to 2007, pesticide spraying was reduced by 359 million kilograms, which is equivalent to 125 per cent of the annual volume of pesticide active ingredient applied to arable crops in the European Union.
The fuel savings associated with making fewer spray runs...