Tag: agro

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...

Researchers around the world are trying to economically convert cellulosic biomass such as corn stover into "cellulosic ethanol." But Agricultural Research Service scientists have found that it might be more cost-effective, energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable to use corn stover for generating an energy-rich oil called bio-oil and for making biochar to enrich soils and sequester carbon. The research, under-written by the National Corn Growers Association, suggests it could be more cost-effective to produce bio-oil through a distributed network of small pyrolyzers and then transport the crude bio-oil to central refining plants to make "green gasoline", rather than transporting bulky stover to a large centralised cellulosic ethanol plant. Researchers found that the bio-oil captured 70 per cent of the total energy input, and the energy density of the bio-oil was five to 16 times the energy density of the feedstock. Also, the research indicates that about 18pc of the feedstock was converted into bio-char, which contains most of the mineral nutrients in the corn residues. Using...

Planting grass hedges could be the answer to successfully bringing some United States Conservation Reserve Program land back into production. Researchers at the Agricultural Research Service have found that grass hedges can help farmers preserve soil and protect water quality by trapping sediment that would otherwise be washed away by field runoff. Their findings are based on a series of studies conducted over 13 years to assess the effectiveness of grass hedges for erosion control in wide or ultra-narrow-row conventional tillage or no-till cotton systems. The researchers established single-row continuous swaths of miscanthus, a tall perennial grass, across the lower ends of 72-foot-long plots with a five per cent slope. The hedges eventually became a yard wide and were clipped two to three times every year after the grass was 5 to 6.5 feet tall. The scientists found that the ability of the hedges to trap sediment increased as the hedges matured. The hedges were more effective at intercepting sediments that washed out of conventionally tilled...