agriculture Archive

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  Does contaminated water make you sick to your stomach? - by frog

  
  
  
  As you know, I am a frog of many talents, and one of the things I like to do in my down time is read specialist medical journals about inflammatory bowel diseases. No really. See, I know a number of people with Crohn’s Disease – a debilitating condition causing chronic inflammation of the intestine – [...] read more
  June 10, 2010 11:00 am - 12 Comments
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  Save your rivers, eat a New Zealand apple? - by frog

  
  
  
  Most people these days are used to thinking about the “carbon footprint” of consumer goods, and know about the concept of “food miles”. But have you ever thought about the “virtual water content” of your food? I hadn’t, so found this story in New Zealand Farmers Weekly quite fascinating. Apparently, about 6.5 litres of water [...] read more
  March 24, 2010 2:34 pm - 25 Comments
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  Baybuzz blog digs slime - by frog

  
  
  
  A frog-friend from a village near the Tukituki River can remember swimming in the river regularly as a child, but he says that the last time he visited (to take his nieces and nephews for a swim) it was pretty disgusting and had obviously become a lot more polluted in the intervening years. Yesterday, Tom Belford [...] read more
  April 20, 2009 8:00 pm - 39 Comments
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  Feds miss the point in celebrating bees - by frog

  
  
  
  Federated Farmers this week celebrated the 150th anniversary of the introduction of bees to New Zealand. A fine occasion to mark, no doubt about it. But there is a distinct lack of ‘joined-up thinking’ in the Feds’ press release. Dr Linda Newstrom-Lloyd writes in the Feb 09 Discovery newsletter (p4-5, but not yet online) from Landcare Research that bees [...] read more
  March 21, 2009 12:59 pm - 23 Comments
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  Wet bus tickets OR Clean Streams - by Russel Norman

  
  
  
  The latest compliance figures on the Clean Streams Accord are due out on Thursday. Fonterra, in an attempt to front foot the issue – hinting that the Accord report will be bad news – has released a proposal to penalise non-compliant farmers a $3000 fine. It’s simply ‘a wet bus ticket’ approach to dealing with [...] read more
  March 9, 2009 11:28 am - 8 Comments
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  Is business the only stakeholder that matters? - by frog

  
  
  
  Agriculture Minister David Carter has admitted that he intentionally left environmentalists, the water rights trust and recreational users off the invite list of a major water users meeting in Canterbury. In the same breath he promised that their concerns would not be ignored. George Orwell and his Ministry of Truth would be proud. Purposefully keeping [...] read more
  December 22, 2008 11:54 am - 65 Comments
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  Michael Pollan on Food, Energy and Health - by frog

  
  
  
  Hat tip to O’Reilly Radar for leading me to this video of Michael Pollan speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit last month. Pollan tells it like it is – that agriculture is the key to tackling climate change and many other modern ills. Food is the shadow problem if they [the politicians] hope to deal [...] read more
  December 16, 2008 4:39 pm - 11 Comments
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  15% organic by 2015 - by frog

  
  
  
  One of the cornerstone policy points of the recently released Green Agriculture Policy is for New Zealand to be 15% organic by 2015. This may seem ambitious to some, but with the size of the world market, New Zealand´s entire national output could be organic and it would be a small player. So fears that [...] read more
  October 26, 2008 8:57 pm - 19 Comments
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  Greenpeace lays out the election issue - by frog

  
  
  
  It was guiltily good to read Bunny McDiarmid’s Greenpeace analysis of the Emissions Trading Scheme because it seems she and her colleagues have been struggling with exactly the same issues that the Green Party faced when deciding whether to vote for the legislation or not.  With the bill now law there’s a big risk that [...] read more
  September 16, 2008 12:34 pm - 8 Comments
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  Rats - by frog

  
  
  
  The international food crisis is having strange effects.  For instance: PHNOM PENH (Reuters) – The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday. Things could have been worse, as Freakonomics notes, rats have been fleeing to higher [...] read more
  September 2, 2008 11:09 am - 6 Comments
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  Emissions trading scheme – credits, biodiversity and agriculture - by frog

  
  
  
  Jeanette gave her second reading speech on the Emissions Trading Scheme last week and it’s worth pulling out a few quotes to discuss some of the technical details.  First let’s look at one of the changes the Greens made to the free credit allocations for trade exposed industries: In a further amendment, the Minister must [...] read more
  September 2, 2008 8:34 am - 11 Comments
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  Yes to the Emissions Trading Scheme - by frog

  
  
  
  The Green Party caucus has just voted to support the Emissions Trading Scheme. I was watching caucus debate through the window and can confirm the decision did not look to be a foregone conclusion. Jeanette’s media release highlights some of the improvements to the scheme: We have always said the scheme needed to share the [...] read more
  August 26, 2008 2:30 pm - 138 Comments
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  Carbon neutral cows - by frog

  
  
  
  Gareth Renowden’s Hot Topic blog traces the increasingly bizarre claim from climate science deniers (sorry, doubters) that cows are carbon neutral.  He begins noting an organisation called the “Carbon Sense Coalition” (the name says it all) is covering its own earlier pronouncement that that ‘cows are green’ because they store carbon: Methane breaks down to [...] read more
  July 2, 2008 11:14 am - 38 Comments
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  Agriculture MoU (Mooo) - by Jeanette Fitzsimons

  
  
  
  Today I questioned the Government about its 2003 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the agriculture sector. The Government has claimed in the past that this MOU prevents it from bringing agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) prior to 2013, however, the answers to my questions revealed a different situation altogether: 1. I asked if [...] read more
  June 18, 2008 6:59 pm - 12 Comments
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  UNESCO calls for a paradigm change away from fossil fuels - by frog

  
  
  
  Now where could I have heard this before? Jamey Keaten from the Associated Press has written an interesting article about the 3 year report from UNESCO: “The status quo today is no longer an option,” Guilhem Calvo, an adviser with UNESCO’s ecological and earth sciences division, told a news conference at the release of the [...] read more
  April 18, 2008 9:25 am - 6 Comments
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  GE breaks its promise - by frog

  
  
  
  The promise of GE was that it was going to feed the starving masses. Now a UN report that 400 scientists spent four years helping to write criticises GE saying it has little role to play in helping to feed the world and that scientific time and energy time instead needs to be invested protecting [...] read more
  April 17, 2008 9:59 am - 12 Comments
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  The race to be the first carbon zero country - by frog

  
  
  
  The Independent has coverage of the worldwide competition to be the first country to go carbon neutral. The leading four countries are Iceland, Norway, Costa Rica and New Zealand, which each formally signed up to go carbon neutral at last years’ Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme. [Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director] spells [...] read more
  April 16, 2008 9:08 am - 5 Comments
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  UN calls for change in farming practices as food riots continue - by frog

  
  
  
  As food prices around the world continue to soar, a United Nations report released today says that industrial agricultural practices are exhausting land and water resources, destroying diversity and hurting poor people. The report’s authors recommend that agricultural science place greater emphasis on safeguarding natural resources and on ‘agro-ecological’ practices, including the use of natural [...] read more
  April 10, 2008 12:15 pm - 9 Comments
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  Tahorakuri Forest: from carbon sink to industrial dairy - by frog

  
  
  
  This stunning photo that Greenpeace released today shows Tahorakuri Forest near Taupo being rapidly converted into industrial dairy farms.  The organisation doing this damage is  the government-owned company Landcorp: Greenpeace points out that up to 455,000 hectares of forestry land is at risk of being deforested and converted into industrial farms – the majority for [...] read more
  April 8, 2008 5:30 pm - 9 Comments
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  Greenpeace, climate change and agriculture - by frog

  
  
  
  One of things that most strongly differentiates the Green Party’s holistic approach to dealing with climate change from other parties is that it does not have a blind spot on the issue of agriculture [pdf].Greenpeace, in it’s survey of political parties policies on climate change, asked all parties whether the farming sector or taxpayers should [...] read more
  March 31, 2008 12:02 pm - 13 Comments