If you were to drive through farmland in rural Java, Indonesia, on a recent morning and roll down your car windows, you probably wouldn’t take in the wet grass smell of the rice paddies. Instead, you might get an odor more like a chemistry lab. Out in the fields, farmers are spraying chemical pesticides. It …
I recently visited farmers in Limuru, a town outside of Nairobi, Kenya, where I met Angella, a 35-year-old single mother of three school-age children who lost her husband in a car accident seven years ago. For many seasons, Angella planted seed recycled from the previous year’s crop. Her harvest was never large enough to feed …
Farmers are reacting to an infestation of an insidious pest – the fall army worm – by indiscriminately spraying their crops with whichever combination of chemical fertilizers are available. The pest is ravaging staple food crops like maize, rice, wheat and millet in eastern and southern Africa and threatening food security of millions of people. …
The New York region is set to welcome one of the most impressive indoor urban farming units in history. Known as Aerofarms, it is the latest in a movement known as vertical farming that utilizes abandoned buildings, warehouses and skyscrapers to grow food. Sophisticated technology based on LED lights, water, nutrients and air dispenses with the need …
Mogadishu – One of my earliest childhood memories is of swimming in a small gully near my grandmother’s home in Yaaq Bari Wayne, a dusty collection of tin-roofed adobe buildings huddled together in the plains of southern Somalia’s Bay region. After the Gu rains, the gully became a deep triangular cleft cut into the ground, …