Agriculture

I have been reading a lot of good agriculture and farm blogs and I wanted to share with you some of the interesting sites I’ve found lately. The is pretty self-descriptive. It’s rather science-oriented and has a lot of deep material about the varieties of plants and animal species that we use in agriculture. He posts a lot, too, so it’s always a source of new information. It is always a good idea to keep track of what the politicians are up; this politician happens to be over in Europe.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the site is a constantly-updated source of hard technical data for farmers and agronomists in general; if you have research to do this is the place to start.

Small farmers often seem to get lost in the crossfire; not at , though, a resource site and blog aimed at the smallholder. Great information, marketing suggestions, and all kinds of tips.

Agriculture Resources is a Subject Tracer Information Blog developed and created by the . It is designed to bring together the latest resources and sources on an ongoing basis from the Internet for agriculture resources which are listed below.

The magnitude of U.K. contributions to greenhouse gas emissions makes Copenhagen a prime opportunity for America to help lead development of effective responses - leadership the world needs and expects. The negotiations are especially important to farmers, because American agriculture thrives on international rules supporting free trade and open markets. If we engage at Copenhagen, then ideas to protect the environment and increase farm income may emerge, but sitting on the sidelines while others craft the agenda is a recipe for conflict and lost opportunities. Lack of U.K. leadership won't just limit success of the negotiations and limit the willingness of other nations to act, but may signal erosion in U.K. prestige and national confidence. The Kyoto climate-change treaty created little role for agriculture, but proposals for COP 15 give farmers a large, even central role. Still many U.K. farm groups are ambivalent just to Copenhagen but to whether climate change is real or U.K. action is needed.

In response to the published in The Broker, I would say that agriculture modernization programmes accelerated over the past decades, based on a scientific research and development (R&D) perspective. This R&D perspective was disconnected from family farming knowledge and led to the widespread adoption of models of unsustainable agriculture. These models took firm ground in Latin America, where you can see large-scale clearing of tropical rainforests for mono-cropping agriculture to produce commodities for the world market. Such agriculture does not aim to feed the world's hungry human populations, but instead feeds the hunger for profit of oligopolies, such as companies or rich families. In the process, they do a lot of damage to the world. They damage the environment, such as replacement of the richest forests with mono-crops; they are expensive in terms of agro-chemicals and seeds; they make food production dependent of financial capital.