The University of Georgia is a respected research university. Thirty-five thousand students attend the main campus in Athens, Georgia, and extended campuses around the state. And among its areas of research is agriculture. UGA has a center in San Luis de Monteverde in Costa Rica. This center is for students and visitors who want to learn more […]
Organic farming avoids the use of chemical pesticides and manmade fertilizers. Supporters say organic farming is better for the environment than other methods. But studies have shown that organic farming often produces less food per hectare. That lower yield means feeding the world organically would require more land. But good farmland is limited. And scientists say […]
Has anyone ever tried to get your goat? To “get your goat” is an expression. It means to make you mad. A good friend might tell you: “Don’t worry about what that person said. He was just trying to get your goat.” But there are plenty of good reasons to get a goat — and not […]
A United Nations report predicts that world rice production will be higher this year thanlast year. The report is from the Food and Agriculture Organization. The FAO says the global rice harvest should be almost two percent higher this year, mainly because ofincreased production in Asia. Large gains are expected in Bangladesh, Burma, China, India, Pakistan, […]
Space Explorations Technologies, or Space X, may be a company to watch in the coming years. On Tuesday, May twenty-second, Space X successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The privately-built and owned Dragon spacecraft was loaded with more than five hundred kilograms of supplies for the International Space Station. The […]
Kickstarter is a website where people give money to support creative projects. It started in two thousand nine, mostly to help artists and musicians. Now, inventors, people starting businesses and a growing number of farmers are raising money on this site for crowd-sourced funding. Josh Brill and Meadow Squire grow vegetables and rice in Tinmouth, […]
Scientists have made a genetic map of the tomato. Tomatoes are second only to potatoes as the world’s most valuable vegetable crop. Eight years of work went intomaking the map, or genome. Three hundred scientists around the world took part in the project to sequence the tomato’s DNA code. Giovanni Giuliano, a researcher in Italy, is […]
Leaders and officials from governments and nongovernmental groups recently met in Brazil for the Rio+20 Conference. The full name was the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. It marked the twentieth anniversary of the Earth Summit, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro. It also came ten years after the […]
When is a plant considered a weed? Experts at Penn State University have a simple answer: When its undesirable qualities outweigh its good qualities. Consider the fact that crops generally produce several hundred seeds from each plant. But each weed plant can produce tens or even hundreds of thousands of seeds. And some buried seeds […]
Most kinds of rose plants are native to Asia. But roses also grow in other parts of the world including northwest Africa, Europe and the United States. In nineteen eighty-six, Congress and President Ronald Reagan declared the rose as America’s “national floral emblem.” They proclaimed it the national flower, in other words. But whatever the name, the choice […]