Agriculture is what makes us human. Sure, there are ants and fish and crabsthat perform the act of cultivating food; but this is a different kind of farming. Humans use farming to sustain our imbalanced population growth, and in many ways it has gotten away from us.

An average of 40% of the nitrogen fertiliser applied to crops isn’t utilised and could be lost. However, by making small changes to fertiliser use, farmers can reduce these losses and boost margins.

Such as change in pH, desertification, loss of vegetative cover, change in soil structure, use of toxic pollutant, miss use of fertilizer, overgrazing, poor farming, deforestation.

Gabe Brown, a city boy from Bismark, North Dakota bought the farm of his in-laws in 1991. The farm grew small grains, mostly spring wheat, oats, and barley, using the conventional farming practices Brown’s predecessors had followed since 1956 – tilling (plowing) the land to seed and applying synthetic fertilizers and herbicides annually.

Today, agriculture is a major contributor to challenges facing our environment: land degradation, aquifer depletion, nitrogen runoff and greenhouse gas emissions, to name a few.

There is no shortage of scary facts in the major new report on climate change and land, a summary of which was released today by a United Nations–led scientific panel. Chief among them:

We are all familiar with erosion and the soil’s ability to wear away, but few people associate soil with growing upward.

The word “climate” makes most of us look up to the sky – however, the IPCC’s new special report on climate change and land should make us all look under our feet.

Where would we be if we did not have air, water, soil and the sun? Even without one of these essential ecosystem elements, our survival on Earth would be dismal. ,

Soils are the foundation of life, as they sustain humans, plants and animals for present and future generations. Protecting and sustainably managing soil is therefore of paramount importance, particularly in the context of climate change, deforestation and loss of biodiversity.

It’s like a trip back in time. Not long after you leave the gleaming skyscrapers of Cape Town, you’re passing neat little wooden houses lining the side of the street. And suddenly the names are all in French. There is a “Place Vendome” and “L’Ermitage.” The Franschhoek Valley wine route passes through one of South Africa’s largest wine growing regions once founded by French immigrants.

“Cheap and cheerful” — for a long time that was the image of South African wines.

If you want to do something about global warming, look under your feet.

A NEW perennial legume with the potential to revolutionise grazing in sandy infertile pastoral areas will be available to Australian and South African farmers next year.

According to the United Nations, sometime around 2050, the planet’s human population will be close to ten billion, a threshold that will stress many of the world’s most important systems, especially agriculture.

Compaction describes when soil has been compressed by, for example, machinery or livestock into a solid impermeable layer, either at the surface or within the topsoil.

To find the answer, UMN Extension Educator Jodi DeJong-Hughes and private consultant Frenchie Bellicot performed GPS analysis on seven pairs of ruts and neighboring non-rutted area in four fields near Clarkfield, Minnesota.

Use of antibiotics is under heightened scrutiny due to the increased prevalence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

We often forget we ourselves are animals.

An important part of strong legumes pastures not only includes suitable species and varieties, but also successful nodulation with appropriate root nodule bacteria. 

Another wet fall means that harvesting crops from saturated fields could lead to compaction issues.