Synopsis:
2.0.. agro:
BBC 00215.txt
Before the industrialisation of agriculture, most people lived in land-based villages no larger or more complex than the Tankas'simple water-based community.
Yet most fish farming has evolved not beyond the low-tech cages and seaweed-draped lines anchored in shallow seas by ancient peoples like the Tankas.
But the drawbacks of current fish farming has created opportunities for technology like the floating"drifter pens  pioneered by Kampachi Farms.
but land-based agriculture may also be in danger due to a predicted shortage of the crucial nutrient phosphorus by the year 2050.
and volcanic ash is still intact. Electro-accretion oe essentially sticking concrete-like minerals on galvanized underwater structures oe means electrified steel mesh could eventually be used to reinforce
BBC 00486.txt
The practice of biomimicry already taps into nature's ingenuity oe for example, the famous hexagonal skin of Norman Foster's Gherkin was inspired by the Venus Flower Basket sponge,
Think of how trees share common technologies (leaves, trunk, roots) adapted to different kinds of environments
which in turn, enriches the food for the trees. In the near future, we will begin to tap into the technological potential of this metabolic diversity
While trees are complex organic structures that require substantial infrastructures and resources to nurture them, biotechnology has revealed that multicellular organisms can perform similar processes oe but even more powerfully.
they are much easier to keep and much more vigorous than trees. Indeed, architects are already proposing that microorganisms may power our cities.
-which enables us to grow organisms that do not exist in nature by manipulating their DNA oe to create trees that produce a natural light-producing protein usually found in jellyfish.
called bioprocessing, is being realised in wastewater gardens. These may be thought of as bacterial cities within our own,
these sewage plants are popular visitor attractions, odourless greenhouses with the look and feel of a botanical garden (such as Koh Phi Phi Don in Thailand).
BBC 00888.txt
whose details had been lost to the passage of time and the decay of the jungle. The going was tough,
and study forests and other vegetation. He suggested they give it a go. So, in 2009, the pair packed away their machetes
and forwards over the tree-tops firing pulses of laser light at the ground below.
In less than a week, the team collected more data than they had in a quarter of century of hacking their way through the jungle.
from gauging distances between cars in adaptive cruise control to mapping forest canopies and detecting the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere.
So, in the case of areas covered in a forest canopy such as in Caracol, some of the pulses will hit the top of tree canopy, some the middle, others the forest floor.
Software can then be used to remove the points above the ground, according to University of Alabama archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak,
This leaves a detailed"digital elevation  model of the hidden forest floor with the ability to pick out features as small as 20cm across."
Overnight it changed archaeologists'perception of the site from a rarely-inhabited ceremonial center to a bustling city with a complex system of agriculture to support it.
Instead of a wilderness, here were two continents with vast populations, grand urban centres and widespread agriculture.
Both the Chases and Fisher teams admit that cruising over the tree-tops in a plane does not totally supplant the need to get up close and personal with a site.
and the thousand other misfortunes that an expedition to the jungle can encounter. Fisher, however, puts it more bluntly:"
which can now only be glimpsed in satellite imagery on tree-cleared landscapes. He also believes it will also allow us to understand ancient African migrations and cultures,
also currently obscured by forests. Other targets include Sri lanka, India and other sites around Southeast asia.
BBC 00923.txt
When good milk turns badwilliam Kisaalita has cold milk on his mind. The tissue engineer runs a program at the University of Georgia in the US that develops new technologies to help farmers in his native Uganda,
I've always had an interest in doing something for small farmers, Kisaalita tells me. They are my aunts and uncles, my brothers and sisters.
including a low-cost nutcracker for farmers in Morocco and a solar-powered incubator for guinea fowl in Burkina faso.
But now he has turned his attention to milk producers in his home country. Many small-scale Ugandan farmers own a few cows,
which are milked twice a day to sell locally or to larger dairies. But here's the thing-for it to stay fresh,
the milk has to be cooled oe easier said than done in areas with intermittent or no electricity.
I've seen farmers pour their milk away at the end of the day Kisaalita says. Sometimes as much as half of it.
 And when sour milk is poured away, so too are profits and a valuable source of nutrition.
The United nations, in fact, estimates that 27%of all milk in Uganda goes to waste, much of it due to spoilage.
The UN says that loss costs Ugandan farmers more than $20m a year. The yearly losses are similar for neighbouring Kenya and Tanzania.
So Kisaalita and his students began building a small-scale milk chiller that could hold 20 litres of the white stuff.
Traditionally, big dairy machines have an outer and inner tank with insulation in the space between.
Compressors, condensers and refrigerants are pumped through the system to rapidly chill the milk and keep it Cool it's a system that requires a constant electrical power,
So, instead, they turned to another product that cows produce in abundance. A small farmer with five cows produces a lot of dung,
says Kisaalita. You can ferment the dung, and use a fraction of the biogas to run the milk chiller.
The rest could be used for cooking or lighting. In addition the slurry that comes out of the biogas can be used to fertilize grass and crops,
he says. Although on paper it looked like they had cracked the problem, Kisaalita found that farmers were convinced not that converting the biogas was worth the money.
As an alternative, he developed a milk chiller that runs on propane, which is cheaper and widely available locally.
the small farmer could milk her cows in the evening, chill it, and then add more milk in the morning.
Then she could wait for the buyer who will give her the best price because she's not in a hurry to sell.
because she knows the milk won't go bad. Kissalita is not the first person to try to solve the problem of keeping milk cool in soaring temperatures.
which the milk  containers  are placed. A big advantage of the system is that it can be made using local materials
and adapted for use to store everything from milk, fruit and certain medicines. In Ghana, for example, a modified design allows the mama mboga oe ladies who run market stalls oe to display her fruit
vegetables and meats without it turning bad.""I left the system with the fundi's oe the carpenters
I had built it with-who had mega plans for mass production, Â says Wanjhia.""I hope they made good their promises.
when it comes to chilling milk. One of these is a US company called Promethean Power systems
and consumes more milk than any other country in the world. You have a quality issue,
You have to race warm milk from thousands of villages to large collection centres, twice a day.
And if you don't chill milk within four hours of milking the cow the bacteria grows to a point where it just goes bad.
or care so much, about how milk is produced and stored in India. The start of that process began
In 2007, they went to India to test their business plan and that's when White and his partner, Sorin Grama, first heard about the milk problem.
if there was a way to develop a cost-effective way to chill the milk more locally,
White and Grama toyed with different designs, and different technologies. Like Kisaalita, they thought about using solar power,
The company recently field tested a 750 litre device with India's largest private dairy.
The cost for Promethean's chiller is around $9, 000-a good price point for bigger Indian dairies, White notes,
The modified design incorporates a wireless device that can send employees text messages about the amount of milk in the tank,
BBC 01150.txt
the sheep. The team had found a way of replacing the nucleus of a sheep's egg cell with a nucleus from an adult ewe's cell,
and yet still trick the egg into dividing as normal. After the hybrid egg cell began dividing,
From dogs to cows, scientists rushed to clone a menagerie of animals using Wilmut's technique, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT.
The first, Noah, a threatened species of ox from Southeast asia called a guar, was born seemingly healthy on 8 january 2001.
Scientists at the American biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technologies who had helped pioneer cloning in cattle,
shuttled nuclei from gaur skin cells into cow eggs and then implanted the embryos into cows.
However, Noah died two days later of an infection unrelated to the cloning process. And like the guar, other attempts to clone endangered species through somatic cell nuclear transfer tended to be one-offs.
Many animals were born unhealthy and the cloning process was inefficient, with success rates of around 1%.Less charitable critics still call these efforts stunts,
and scientists hope their bones could be a source of DNA-containing marrow cells for cloning.
What is more, the technologies that scientists are hoping to use have mostly been developed for use in laboratory animals and valuable livestock only.
BBC 01170.txt
what helped save the day was the so-called"Green revolution Â. The movement was spearheaded by American agronomist Norman Borlaug,
who cleverly bred wheat to be shorter but sturdier and better at producing the parts we eat.
Borlaug's approach drew its fair share of critics, in part through its reliance on pesticides and fertilisers.
But breeding high-yield crops in this manner more than doubled farm field yields globally in 50 years, particularly in Latin america and Asia,
When this happens, yields can improve by 15%in vital crops like wheat, rice and soybean.
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide further is hardly a practical or desirable way to boost crops, so the team set about looking for the genetic switches that could mimic the action
British researchers have shown already that tobacco plants engineered to express more SBPASE grew 10%larger in a glasshouse.
However, this is not the only way of increasing photosynthesis. Scientists are also exploring the idea that genes from the ancestors of modern-day plants might boost the ability of crops to harness the sun. It is well known that primitive plants known as cyanobacteria have a talent
they achieved a 20%increase in tobacco plants after adding a single cyanobacteria gene called inorganic carbon transporter B (Ictb.
and colleagues from the University of Nebraska have carried out some initial tests on soybeans transformed with the same gene,
and others ethical, arguing that the developing world should not be used as a laboratory to test such crops.
 Turning the world greentraditionally, farmers have sought out the best places to plant their crops oe nutrient rich flood plains and the sides of volcanoes.
As a result, there is a push to develop crops that not only grow in these conditions oe they relish them.
researchers like Abdelbagi Ismail at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines are developing strains of rice that can flourish in flooded areas.
As many as 20 million hectares of cultivated rice are affected by submergence in Asia every year. To get round the problem,
Ismail and his team scoured the vaults of their institute's rice seed bank oe the world's largest with more than 110,000 varieties.
They were looking for types of rice that survive on sketchy land, regardless of whether they produced low or high yields.
they then crossed this flood-tolerant strain with a high-yield strain of rice.""This form of breeding used to take 6-15 years,
Their submergence-resistant rice has been distributed to farmers in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia and the Philippines.
These people live in parts of the world where their diets are dominated by staples oe foods such as rice, wheat, cassava,
millet and maize oe that are high in calories but lack iron, zinc, Vitamin a and other micronutrients.
The best-known example of boosting nutrition in staple crops is golden rice, which has been engineered with genes from daffodils and bacteria to produce beta-carotene,
golden rice is still not available for general use. Some environmental groups, including Greenpeace, fear that this genetically modified strain could contaminate
and harm other vital rice strains. But rather than importing genes from another organism researchers are now trying to find maize strains that naturally produce high levels of beta-carotene.
Torbert Rocheford of Purdue University, Edward Buckler of Cornell University, and their collaborators screened around 300 maize strains,
and unearthed some with boosted beta-carotene levels. They then looked for any genes in these maize strains that resembled genes linked to high beta-carotene levels in other plants."
"It's the sort of process where either you hit a grand slam home run or strike out. There's nothing in between, Â says Rocheford.
finding a small number of maize varieties that grow in both tropical and temperate climates and
Plant breeders are using the naturally occurring maize plants and those markers to breed new plants.
the process has boosted concentration of beta-carotene in the corn from practically nothing to about 8 micrograms per gram oe around 53%of Harvestplus'target for the micronutrient.
The organisation expects to release corn that achieves that target in 3-4 years. What will really determine its success is
if farmers will regularly plant this orange corn in a region where people traditionally eat white corn with no beta-carotene.
and Melinda Gates Foundation, is releasing the fortified corn in Zambia, where more than half of children experience Vitamin a deficiencies.
say advocates of an expanding type of agriculture called precision farming. This is based on research that shows there is a significant variation in how crops grow over distances as small as an acre,
says Raj Khosla, an agriculture researcher at Colorado State university, and president of the International Society of Precision Agriculture.
He is helping farmers to harvest a new crop: data. They do it by bringing electronic tools into their crop rows-global positioning systems, infrared devices that measure soil's electrical conductivity and light and sound sensors.
Combining all that and more gives farmers precise information about variety in plant health, size and even nitrogen needs.
herbicides and pesticides different areas require. At first the appeal was that farmers would save money
"But with precise input management, farmers can also influence grain yield and efficiency. Â Some academics and sustainable farming advocates see this type of farming as one more push toward industrialising food production and making more farmers dependent on agribusiness.
But Josã Â Molin, a precision farming researcher at the University of Sao paulo in Brazil, says the concept has promise for farmers with
and without the means or inclination to buy expensive equipment.""We still have to develop the concept to apply it to small farmers and to low tech or low income areas,
 says Molin.""But the concept is always the same. Even small fields are different in different locations.
In 2011 more corn went to biofuel than to feed for the first time in the US. Another big pressure is climate change.
impactlab_2010 01547.txt
a novella by Anne Rice published in 1991 as a paperback, illustrates some of the possibilities.
As a $4. 99 application sold through Apples itunes store oethe Master of Rampling Gate comes with video interviews with Rice and others.
Rice speaks about her inspiration for her works and about the Gothic genre in which she writes.
Within the text are links to Web pages that elaborate on events and places in the story a description of the Mayfair neighborhood in London where the protagonists live or a history of the Black death plague,
Rice said in an interview. Vook (the name is a mash-up of oevideo and oebook) has published more than two dozen titles,
and nonfiction books some by established authors, others by complete unknowns along with recipes for spinach calzones and 1950s-era manuals for building transistor radios,
She read a chunk of the Senates healthcare reform bill, a document called oewhats in A can of Red Bull?(
impactlab_2010 01611.txt
Apple is making all these companies rethink their business models. It wasnt long ago that luxury primarily meant the accumulation of designer clothes
The four brands most admired by Americans with six-digit incomes in a recent survey by the marketing specialist Affluence Collaborative were Apple, Microsoft, Best Buy and Sony.
He says that Apple and Sony are emerging as the newest luxury designer labels. oewith Apple,
you get a better design, a better function and a better luxury experience than you do with most other luxury brands,
whose company Pedraza wont name due to client confidentiality, said it was Apple. Apple declined to comment.
Not a need, but a want But Yolanda Cummings, who works as a finance professional in Columbus, Ohio, says that to her,
there are few things closer to luxury than owning her new Apple ipad. oei dont need it.
She already has a $300 Apple ipod touch and $1, 600 Apple Macbook. oei used to go overboard buying clothes,
she says. oenow, Im more inclined to purchase new technologies. Andrew Sacks, who is president of Agencysacks,
and discovered a black leather John Varvatos jacket that hed casually purchased several years ago for $1, 500 at a New york boutique.
and prune the fruit trees he has in his backyard. But he also likes to watch sports on TV.
impactlab_2010 02347.txt
#Student in Kenya Invents Solar Powered Forest fire Detector Kenya Forest Services workers use branches to put out a fire at Karura forest in Nairobi.
Efforts to curb forest loss around the world as a means of cutting carbon emissions just got a boost:
then automatically relays the information to a forest station through mobile phone technology. oethe heat sensors are programmed to detect temperatures which are over 45 degrees Celsius,
he said. oeonce the forest station receives the alert, the rangers can then marshal reinforcements from the nearby fire station to put out the fire.
Fires in Kenya last year destroyed 11,370 hectares of bush and forest land. Thirty-five percent of the already heavily deforested Mau Forest Complex was lost to fire, according to Noor Hassan Noor, an administrator in Kenyas Rift valley province.
Noor called the new fire reporting device a potentially useful part of Kenyas effort to keep forest fires in check. oethis is an interesting invention
impactlab_2010 02409.txt
This is exactly the premise that is driving many of the advances in farming today. To understand agribusiness in the future,
consider a model that conveniently exists right now in the human-food interface. Metabolism is used a term to describe the various chemical reactions that take place in every cell of the body.
and monitor a persons metabolic reaction to the food eaten will cause the agriculture industry to evolve with great precision around the tiny niche demands of consumers.
Much like the seemingly endless iterations of coffee at Starbucks, food from restaurants and fast food outlets will come in over a million variations.
and 3. 6 grams of calcium that has a hint of almond and banana flavoring on a sesame seed bun with exactly 47 sesame seeds on it.
This may seem a ridiculous level of specificity. But in an automated society the process will become seamless and invisible to the end user.
Medium for me, please with only one dill pickle, no lettuce and a tomato. Farmers will become expert at producing oejacked-in food stocks with countless variations,
and generic non-species plants designed for postharvest flavor and nutrient infusions. Leveraging Plant Intelligenceaside from growing food, new opportunities will emerge for oegrowing products.
For instance, jacking into a tree, we will someday be able to oetrain a tree to have its branches grow into the shape of end tables,
coffee tables, chairs, or rocking chairs. Once these unusual branches are fully grown, farmers can walk up to the tree and harvest the rocking chairs by cutting them down,
similar to harvesting apples or cherries. Eventually we will be able to oegrow our own clothing,
clothing that is intelligent, self-repairing, able to change colors to match our mood, and protective in extreme elements.
Vertical Farmingthe precision we use to monitor consumer demand will translate into ultra-precise farming operations in highly controlled environments.
Since traditional greenhouses are expensive to build and inefficient to operate, farming in the future will go vertical.
Several experimental vertical farming projects like Dr. Dickson Despommiers at Columbia University are in various conceptual and experimental stages of implementation.
The concept of vertical farming that I envision has been framed around the idea of creating both below-surface and above-surface silos serving as vertical greenhouses for the production of food.
These cylindrical shaped silos with honeycomb lined walls filled with rich top soil have the ability to convert a small surface area on land into a much larger surface area on the walls of the silos.
and external wind generators for power, these self-contained farming silos can be constructed in desolate climates, deserts, on rocky ground,
and precision of farming operations will create unprecedented new levels of opportunity in agriculture, making future agribusiness professionals some of the most highly skilled people on earth.
Thomas Frey is the executive director and senior futurist at the Davinci Institute and currently Googles top-rated futurist speaker.
impactlab_2010 02432.txt
#The Sahara Forest Project A Renewable Energy Oasis The Sahara Forest Project The Sahara Forest Project is a unique combination of proven environmental technologies,
such as solar thermal power, modern biomass production and the Seawater Greenhouse. The resulting synergies enable restorative growth in the worlds most arid regions.
Pics) Can you imagine being able to produce enough water in the Sahara to grow crops there?
A trio of visionaries launched the Sahara Forest Project: their proposal to combine two innovative technologies, Concentrated Solar power (CSP) and Seawater Greenhouses,
to produce renewable energy, water and food in an area of desert known to be one of the hottest places on earth.
The Sahara Forest Project is one of the first projects weve seen that proposes not only to combine technologies to optimise performance and production
Positive Collaboration The most exciting aspect of the Sahara Forest Project is not specifically the use of these technologies.
Weve read about Seawater Greenhouses and Concentrated Solar power and how theyre being used to great effect.
an inventor Charlie Paton, creator of the Seawater Greenhouse; an architect Michael Pawlyn of Exploration Architecture, previously of Grimshaw and the lead architect on the iconic Eden Project;
What does a Seawater Greenhouse do? The Seawater Greenhouse was designed to address the problem of irrigating crops in arid coastal regions by evaporating seawater and condensing it into fresh water.
This helps to reverse the trend of desertification created by normal industrial greenhouses, which can use up to five times more water to irrigate crops than the respective regions average annual rainfall.
The system works by mimicking the natural hydrological cycle where seawater heated by the sun,
evaporates, cools down to form clouds and returns to the earth as rain, fog or dew.
Like the Seawater Greenhouse, CSP works well in hot arid areas where the sun is at its most powerful.
How will the Sahara Forest Project work? These CSP/Seawater Greenhouse technologies will work together at a location some distance from the north coast of Africa, hopefully at a point below sea level
which will reduce or potentially eliminate the costs of pumping seawater. The scheme has been designed as a hedge of greenhouses providing a windbreak and shelter for the outdoor planting.
CSP arrays will be placed at intervals along the greenhouse hedge. The greenhouses produce five time more fresh water than needed for the plants inside.
This surplus will be used to irrigate the planted orchards and the Jatrophra crop, which can be turned into biofuel for transportation and other needs.
Commercial Synergies The Sahara Forest Project team tell us that the innovative interaction between the two technologies helps each to function more efficiently:
1. CSP systems need water for cleaning the mirrors and for the generation of steam to drive the turbines which the greenhouses can provide. 2. The Greenhouse evaporators make very efficient dust traps (as do plants that are growing outside)
which benefits the CSP since the mirrors stay cleaner and therefore operate more efficiently. 3. In solar thermal power plants,
only about 25%of the collected solar energy is converted into electricity. If combined with sea water another 50%of the collected energy,
In conclusion the Sahara Forest Project works on many levels. By combining the benefits of Concentrated Solar power
and Seawater Greenhouses the design team has scaled vastly up the positive outputs of renewable energy, food production and fresh water supply.
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