Recent grants from two Church of the Brethren funds–the Global Food Crisis Fund and the Emergency Disaster Fund–include $50,000 to support agriculture in North Korea, which continues to experience periodic famine. “The Church of the Brethren’s reaching out to North Koreans goes beyond the matter of food security,” said Howard Royer, manager of the Global Food Crisis Fund. “It is a testament to risk-taking, bridge- building, and reconciliation in witness to the compassion and love of Jesus Christ for all peoples, and especially for the impoverished and estranged.”
The Global Food Crisis Fund allocation for the Sustainable Agriculture and Community Development Program in North Korea represents the fourth year of supporting Agglobe International with the endeavor. Funds will help purchase seed, plastic sheeting, and fertilizer for farms in the program. The alleviation of periodic famine in North Korea remains a compelling factor, said the grant request.
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Nearly 500,000 Indian farmers are facing the prospect of famine as a plague of rats that strikes once every 50 years threatens to destroy their crops, rice paddies and village granaries. Efforts to control the rodent plague in the north east Indian state of Mizoram have led the local government to offer a reward of one rupee (1.2 pence) for every rat tail delivered to the authorities. More than 400,000 rats have already been killed, creating piles of tails, which have to be counted by officials before reward money can be disbursed to the catchers.
The rat plague occurs once every 50 years in Mizoram – a tiny state of 900,000 people squeezed between India’s borders with Bangladesh and Burma. It is linked to the flowering of a rare species of bamboo, the Mautam or melocanna baccifera. It flowers all together, dropping millions of protein-rich seeds that are devoured by the rats, causing a population explosion. When the seed supply is exhausted, the rats move to crops and granaries.
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To measure a farmer’s ability to produce “more crop per drop”, agricultural scientists now use the term “water productivity”. Farm water productivity can be as high as 20kg/cubic metre water with cereals, or about 10kg/cubic metre with oilseeds and legumes, but such high efficiencies are obtained only in the best managed crops. Almost any factor that can influence crop yield or vigour will influence water efficiency.

Over the coming decades, rises in global demand for food, fibre, feed and fuel are predicted to cause large increases in the amount of water used by agriculture. Currently, agriculture world-wide uses 6,800 cubic kilometre of water annually (km3/y), but by 2050 global water use in farming will need to rise to dramatically to 12,600km3/y unless substantial improvements occur in the water-use efficiency of farming.
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Tooling Up for Hydroponics

The country is almost self-sufficient now in rice production because of the modernisation of the production system and the use of high yielding variety of seeds as well as chemical fertiliser. For Bangladesh this is all the more important because of the size of population and its rate of growth. During the last four decades wheat and many types of food prepared out of it have beocme popular in the country. There is now a wide scope to use potato as another staple food item. Potato is very wholesome, rich carbohydrate, fat and protein.
Bangladeshis use potato mainly as a vegetable to prepare curry. The country now produces enough potatoes and its price is also affordable to average people. The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) has disclosed that it has targetted to produce 39 lakh tons of potato only in northern districts of the country. Potato is better produced in some central districts of the country including those of greater Dhaka and some parts of greater Comilla.
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The cooperative production model has increasingly come to define the development strategies of the “Bolivarian Revolution.” In its August 2005 report, SUNACOOP registered a total of 83,769 cooperatives, with more than 40,000 cooperatives created in 2004 and almost 30,000 more cooperatives formed in the first eight months of 2005. The total number of associates in October 2004 was 945,517, up from 215,000 in 1998.
This proliferation originates in the recognition of cooperatives throughout the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution as key economic actors within the nation’s social economy, portrayed as tools for economic inclusion, participation (article 70), and state decentralization (article 184). More significantly, the state is expected to “promote and protect” cooperatives (articles 118 and 308). It wasn’t until the Ley Especial de Asociaciones Cooperativas (Special Law of Cooperative Associations) was published in September 2001 that numbers started growing with almost 1,000 cooperatives in 2001, more than 2,000 the following year, and more than 8,000 in 2003.
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An Indian hobbyist has created a purely organic nutrient mixture for growing plants in water.
Although it is still an evolving science, hydroponic agriculture (growing plants in water solution rather than soil) is spreading fast the world over.
The nutritional requirement of the plants in this system of soilless farming is met by the nutrient mixtures, called hydroponics fertiliser mixtures, added to the water in which the plant roots are kept submerged. These mixtures are made of chemical plant nutrients. This plant growth solution has been tested successfully for growing several plants, including common vegetables like tomato and arbi and some high value medicinal plants like Brahmi, Arjun and Cineraria.

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

A Ground-breaking ceremony marked the beginning of a mushroom production initiative in Henties Bay, which is said to have a huge potential for lifting the coastal town and the entire Erongo Region out of poverty, providing employment and ensuring food security. Situated on a plot of land right next to the Tulongeni Garden project, the mushroom production project of the University of Namibia is geared towards ensuring sustainable food production for the poor communities of Henties Bay.
The construction of the new mushroom house that will mainly be producing oyster mushrooms further paves the way for the commercialisation of this type of mushroom farming at the town, which is expected to be further expanded to nearby towns of Arandis, Swakopmund and Usakos.
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Organic farms are better for wildlife than those run conventionally, according to a study covering 180 farms from Cornwall to Cumbria.
The organic farms were found to contain 85% more plant species, 33% more bats, 17% more spiders and 5% more birds.
Scientists – from Oxford University, the British Trust for Ornithology, and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology – spent five years on the research.
Funded by the government, it was the largest ever survey of organic farming.
“The exclusion of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers from organic is a fundamental difference between systems,” the study says.
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The key question, at least in the near term, is to determine whether increased vitamin C and photosynthesis will result in greater crop yields.
The harmful effects of smog on people and animals—the stinging eyes and decreased lung capacity—are the stuff of well-researched fact. Now, the body of knowledge about air pollution’s effects on plants has grown with University of California, Riverside Biochemistry Professor Daniel Gallie’s discovery of the importance of vitamin C in helping plants defend themselves against the ravages of ozone—smog’s particularly nasty component.
By manipulating dehydroascorbate reductase (DHAR), a naturally occurring enzyme that recycles vitamin C, to increase the level of the vitamin in leaves, Gallie has been able to reduce the harmful effects of ozone on plants, apparent as brown spots, stunted size, and lowered crop yields. He and Assistant Research Biochemist Dr. Zhong Chen published their findings in a recent paper titled “Increasing Tolerance to Ozone by Elevating Foliar Ascorbic Acid Confers Greater Protection against Ozone than Increasing Avoidance”, in the journal Plant Physiology.
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A tremendous knowledge of tree crops has been amassed by many at great cost in time and energy . . . but is virtually unknown or unaccepted by contemporary farmers.
There is no better example of this unfortunate situation than exists in a review of the life work of J. Russell Smith, tree-man par excellence. Smith launched his study of commercially useless trees in 1910, with a worldwide quest for new varieties. In 1929 he published TREE CROPS—A PERMANENT AGRICULTURE. His valuable tree discoveries were then intensified with more worldwide travel followed by a revised edition of his book in 1954.
As a loyal tree-man, Smith (who, incidentally was professor of economic geography at Columbia University) spoke vehemently against annual row crops. Crops that must build themselves from scratch for each harvest are victims of the climatic uncertainty of short seasons. Tree crops, on the other hand, are not affected by drought to the same degree . . . deep roots enable a tree to accumulate and store moisture.
Smith was repulsed by the fact that four-fifths of everything raised by the American farmer goes to feed animals. He made a good case for a tree crop diet instead, realizing that meat contains 800 calories as compared to nuts which contain 3,200 calories. If animals are to be raised, Smith maintained that they should be allowed to harvest their own crops. This “hogging down” principle is nowadays a major agricultural innovation . . . as when hogs are permitted to harvest corn, soybeans, peanuts, etc. Smith maintained that tree crops can also be harvested directly by animals . . . mulberry, persimmon, oak, chestnut, honey locust, and carob are all excellent stock-food trees.
Andrew Jackson Downing continues to be the tree-crop giant of them all. One of his major works, FRUITS AND FRUIT TREES OF AMERICA, published in 1845, remains today an essential tree crop reference. Resulting from the publication of a number of his important books, Downing’s influence on American fruit tree culture is apparent to this day. He fully remodeled western European fruit growing practices to fit American site and climatic conditions. One contemporary tree crop author found that fruit trees planted in Massachusetts and Michigan during the height of Downing’s influence (18701890) are still standing and bearing fruit. Yet thousands of trees planted in subsequent years (1890-1920) have broken down or died. There is a refreshing simplicity in Downing’s basic principles:
A judicious pruning to modify the form of our standard trees is nearly all that is required in ordinary practice. Every fruit tree, grown in the open orchard or garden as a common standard, should be allowed to take its natural form, the whole efforts of the pruner going no further than to take out all weak and crowded branches.
The tree-men who have qualified the science of pomology are in unanimous agreement on one important aspect: interplanting is a desirable practice. Interplanting makes good sense to the homesteader from a purely economic standpoint. Where peaches, pears and plums are interplanted in apple orchards, revenue from their yields subsidize the apples to production. Rapidly maturing ‘tree crops (like dwarfed varieties) can be alternated with slowly maturing species. Mulberry trees are an excellent choice to interplant in a nut tree orchard . . . they grow rapidly, bear young and are resistant to shade.
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