Analysis Method of Amino Acid

1. Reagent
1.1. Concentrated hydrochloric acid (GR)
1.2. 6 mol/L Hydrochloric acid: Concentrated hydrochloric acid mixed with water in the volume ratio 1:1.
1.3.Phenol: need to be re-distilled.
1.4.(0.0025 mol/L) mixed Amino Acid standard solution (Sold by the equipment manufacturing company)
1.5.Buffer
1.5.1. Sodium citrate buffer with pH2.2: Weigh 19.6g sodium citrate(Na3C6H5O7•2H2O) and 16.5mL concentrated Hydrochloric acid, dilute with water to 1000mL, adjust pH to 2.2 using concentrated Hydrochloric acid, or 500g / L of Sodium Hydroxide solution.
1.5.2. Sodium citrate buffer with pH3.3: Weigh 19.6g Sodium Citrate and 12mL concentrated Hydrochloric acid, dilute with water to 1000mL, adjust Ph to 3.3 by using concentrated Hydrochloric acid or 500g/L Sodium Hydroxide solution.
1.5.3.Sodium citrate buffer with pH4.0: Weigh 19.6g sodium citrate and 9mL concentrated Hydrochloric acid, dilute with water to 1000mL, adjust ph to 4.0 by using concentrated Hydrochloric acid or 500g/L Sodium Hydroxide solution.
1.5.4.Sodium citrate buffer with pH3.3: Weigh 19.6g sodium citrate and 46.8g NaCl (GR), dilute with water to 1000ml, adjust ph to 6.4 by using concentrated Hydrochloric acid or 500g/L Sodium Hydroxide solution.
1.6. Ninhydrin solution
1.6.1.Solution of Lithium acetate dihydrate with pH5.2: Weigh 168g Lithium hydroxide(LiOH•H2O), then adding 279ml glacial acetic acid (GR), dilute with water to 1000mL, adjust ph to 5.2 by concentrated Hydrochloric Acid or 500g/L Sodium Hydroxide solution.
1.6.2. Ninhydrin solution: take 150mL Dimethyl sulfoxide (C2H6OS) and 50mL Lithium acetate dihydrate solution, add 4g (C9H4O3•H2O) and 0.12g Restore Ninhydrin(C18H10O6•2H2O), stir it until completely dissolved.
1.7.High-purity nitrogen: Purity 99.99%
1.8.Refrigerant: mix the salt sold in market with ice in mass ratio 1:3.

2. Instruments and equipment
2.1 Vacuum Pump
2.2 Ovens with constant temperature.
2.3 Hydrolysis tube: pressure resistant glass tube with screw cap or hard glass tube, volume 20ml – 30ml, rinse and dry by Deionized water.
2.4.Vacuum Dryer(Temperature can be adjusted)
2.5 Amino Acid Analyzer

3. Sample handling
Homogenized the samples by homogenizer (or try to crush samples completely), store in the low-temperature refrigerator, unfreeze samples when analyzing.

4. Analysis Steps
4.1 Weigh Sample
Take a certain amount of uniform sample, such as milk, etc., accurate to 0.0001g（the sample protein content within 10mg ~ 20mg; sample in poor uniformity, such as meat, etc. in order to reduce the error, increase the sample weight properly, dilute again before measurement. Put the sample into Hydrolisis tube.
4.2 Hydrolysis
4.2.1. Take 6mol / L hydrochloric acid 10ml ~ 15ml (depending on protein content in the
sample) into the hydrolysis tube, add equal volume of concentrated Hydrochloric Acid into the sample of high water content (such as milk), add newly distilled Phenol of 3 – 4 drops, put the Hydrolysis tube in refrigerant, freeze for 3 – 5 min, connect to the exhaust pipe of vacuum pump, vacuum ( close to 0 Pa), inflate high purity nitrogen; vacuum and inflate nitrogen, repeat 3 times, seal the screw cap close when inflating nitrogen, put the Hydrolysis tube in the costant temperature oven at 110 ℃ ± 1 ℃, hydrolyze for 22 hours, draw out and cooling.
Open the Hydrolysis tube, filter the hydrolysis solution, rinse the hydrolysis tube by deionized water. Remove the hydrolysis solution into 50ml volumetric flask, dilute with deionized water to 50ml. Draw filtrate of 1ml into 5ml volumetric flask, dry at 40℃~ 50℃ by vacuum dryer，dissolve the residues in water of 1-2ml, and dry, repeat twice, then dry completely, dissolve with 1ml pH 2.2 buffer, keep and for use of instrumental determination

5. Determination
draw exactly 0.200ml standard mixed Amino Acid, dilute with pH2.2 buffer to 5ml, the concentration of this standard dilution solution is 5.00 nmol/50μL, use it as the criterion of amino acid determination when on the instruments. Determine the amino acid content of sample solution using the External Standard Method by Amino Acid analyzer.

6. Calculation
Calculate as the expression as below:

Thereinto:
X ---- Amino acid content in sample, unit as g/100g;
C ---- Amino acid content in sample solution, unit as nmol/50μL;
F ----- Dilute multiple of sample;
V ----- Dilution volume after hydrolysis, unit as ml;
M ---- Molecular weight of Amino acid;
m ---- Mass of sample, unit as g;
1/50 ---- Amino acid content of per milliliter sample, unite asμmol/L;
109 ------ Coefficient of convertion of sample content from ng to g.
The molecular weight of the 16 amino acids: Aspartate 133.1, Threonine 119.1, Serine 105.1, Glutamate 147.1, Proline 115.1, Glycine 75.1, Gly Ala 89.1, Valine 117.2, Methionine 149.2, Isoleucine 131.2, Leucine 131.2, Tyrosine 181.1, Phenylalanine 165.2, Histidine 155.2, Lysine 146.2, Arginine 174.2.

Semiochemicals

What are Semiochemicals?
Semiochemicals are message carrying chemicals that are used in nature for communicating between living organisms. Pheromones are the best known group of semiochemicals.

What are Pheromones?
Pheromones are highly specific chemicals produced by many organisms including insects which elicit a response from other individuals of the same species. There are many types of pheromones but only two main types are used for monitoring and pest control.

a) Sex pheromones - these are usually produced by the female of a species in order to attract males of the same species for reproduction. This is the most common type of pheromone and is especially important for moths. Examples include Helicoverpa armigera and Plutella xylostella.

b) Aggregation pheromones - these attract both male and female insects of a species and can be produced by one or both sexes. This type of pheromone tends to be more common amongst beetles but is also important for cockroaches for example.
Other attractants are often used for monitoring. These are used either where the specific pheromone is unknown, or difficult to make, or when the alternative attractant gives superior results. These can be food based or from unrelated sources. In general these attractants are composed of foodstuffs or constituents of food which have been found to be particularly attractive to the target pest(s). Traps may also be baited with a compound or compounds which are not normally produced by an insect, nor found as a component of its food but which never the less attract the insect. Examples of this include Trimedlure used for attracting the Mediterranean Fruit Fly and Methyl Eugenol for Oriental Fruit Fly and other related species.

Pheromone Formulation
Pheromones by their very nature are very volatile and extremely unstable. To use them effectively these chemicals must be formulated so that their release into the air is controlled and so they can be protected from degradation by UV light and oxygen. A wide range of formulations have been developed with varying degrees of sophistication.
For a pheromone system to work effectively it is important to ensure that the lures are made with quality components and that the formulation has been developed to protect the pheromone from degradation and to release it at the required rate for optimal activity. It is very difficult without complex chemical analysis to determine whether any product being offered commercially is effective for the purpose. It is therefore vitally important that users obtain their pheromones from reputable sources.

Trap Designs
The lures themselves are of no use if there is not also some method of trapping the insects. Many factors influence trap design. These include the insect itself, what it does and where it occurs, the expected number of insects to be caught, the general environment of the trap, and the customer's expectation about price and longevity of the product.

Pressure Sensitive Adhesives
Pressure Sensitive Adhesives, or simply Glues, have been used for catching insects for many years. Indeed, in nature there are examples of insects being caught in natural sticky substances, such as “amber” and other plant resins millions of years ago, which are available for scientific examination to this day.
We can easily define the properties of glue that we need in order to make it an effective insect catching substance. These characteristics are its “stickiness” or “aggression”, longevity, i.e. resistance to deterioration from exposure to light, air (oxygen) dust etc, ease of application on plastic and card, health and safety properties and last but not least, economics. Combining

Mating Disruption
Many pests are the most damaging when in their juvenile stages. Most of our pest management practices, including the use of insecticides, target the damaging stages. Mating disruption, instead, targets the adults by interrupting the reproductive cycle so that no eggs or young are produced. The key to mating disruption is to use the insect’s own pheromone against it. The pheromone is formulated into high dose controlled release devices. By artificially increasing the amount of pheromone in the field much higher than what females produce, males can not find the females. Mating does not take place; eggs are not laid and the pest larvae are not produced.

Attract & Kill
Attract & Kill (or Lure and Kill) is based on the combination of a pheromone (or other attractant) and an insecticide to kill the target pest. The insects responding to the attractant contact the pheromone source and are killed or incapacitated. Since most (though not all) of the attractants available are only effective on the males, the system works by removing as large a percentage of the male population as possible thus leaving very few to mate with the females.
Often the action of the pheromone is supplemented by the addition of other attractants such as food volatiles which also attract the female. This leads to reduced egg lay and consequently fewer crop damaging larvae. This technique has been successfully applied to the control of insects such as the Olive fly, Mediterranean fruit fly, Codling moth and many other insects.

Redesigning Crops to Harvest Fuel

That is the new mission of crop scientists. In an era of $3-a-gallon gasoline and growing concern about global warming from fossil fuels, seed and biotechnology companies see a big new opportunity in developing corn and other crops tailored for use in ethanol and other biofuels.

Syngenta, for instance, hopes in 2008 to begin selling a genetically engineered corn designed to help convert itself into ethanol. Each kernel of this self-processing corn contains an enzyme that must otherwise be added separately at the ethanol factory.

Just last week, DuPont and Bunge announced that their existing joint venture to improve soybeans for food would also start designing beans for biodiesel fuel and other industrial uses.

And Ceres, a plant genetics company in California, is at work on turning switch grass, a Prairie States native, into an energy crop.

“You could turn Oklahoma into an OPEC member by converting all its farmland to switch grass,” said Richard W. Hamilton, the Ceres chief executive.

Developing energy crops could mean new applications of genetic engineering, which for years has been aimed at making plants resistant to insects and herbicides, but would now include altering their fundamental structure. One goal, for example, is to reduce the amount of lignin, a substance that gives plants the stiffness to stand upright but interferes with turning a plant’s cellulose into ethanol.

Such prospects are starting to alarm some environmentalists, who worry that altered plants will cross-pollinate in the wild, resulting in forests that practically droop for want of lignin. And some oppose the notion of altering corn to feed the nation’s addiction to automobiles.

“I don’t think people want extra enzymes in the food supply put there to better fit the crops for energy production,” said Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But proponents of designer fuel crops argue that the risks are small compared with the threat of dependence on foreign oil. Some studies also suggest that ethanol use could help fight global warming because the crops that help produce ethanol absorb carbon dioxide.

So far, much of the attention on bioenergy has focused on improving the chemical processes for turning crops into ethanol. But experts say that if biofuels are to make a significant dent in the nation’s petroleum consumption, the crops themselves must be improved to provide more energy from an acre.

And new agricultural sources beyond corn must be developed, they say. Even if the nation’s entire corn crop were converted to ethanol production, it would replace only about 15 percent of petroleum use, according to an Energy Department report.

“Half the improvement we make over the next 10 to 15 years will come from improving the feedstocks,” said Gerald A. Tuskan, a biofuel expert in the department, referring to the crops fed into the ethanol factories.

Some of the work will not necessarily involve genetic engineering. Notably, Monsanto, the leader by far in crop biotechnology, says that its biofuel development will focus on conventional breeding, which it says is quicker.

Monsanto has tested its existing corn varieties to determine which ones are better for ethanol production. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, the DuPont subsidiary that is Monsanto’s rival in the corn-seed business, is doing the same.

The companies say that the designated varieties, which have higher fermentable starch content, can increase ethanol production 2 to 5 percent over other corn. And some factories are starting to request certain types of corn or to pay a premium for more desirable corn, said Pradip Das, head of crop analytics at Monsanto.

Still, some ethanol factory operators say they do not really care which corn they get. The factories are so hungry that they take “pretty much all the commercial corn you can get your hands on,” said David Nelson, chairman of Midwest Grain Processors, which runs an ethanol plant in Lakota, Iowa.

William S. Niebur, vice president for crop genetics research and development at DuPont, said the demands of ethanol production would require extremely hardy corn.

“The demand for this corn grain could be so dramatic,” he said, “that it would change farming practices.” Instead of rotating corn with other crops, he said, farmers would be pressed to grow corn year after year, which could strain the soil and allow the buildup of insects and disease.

Many of the traits needed for energy corn — high yield as well as tolerance to disease, insects and drought — would also be desirable in corn used for human and animal food. That is not the case, though, with Syngenta’s enzyme corn, which would be specifically for energy production.

Generally, the enzyme, known as amylase, is made in vats of bacteria. Ethanol manufacturers add the enzyme to corn to break down starch into sugar, which can be fermented into ethanol.

To get corn to produce its own amylase, Syngenta inserted a gene borrowed from a type of microbe called archaea that live near hot-water vents on the floor of the ocean.

The gene — actually a composite of three amylase genes — was developed with the help of Diversa, a San Diego company that specializes in finding chemicals in organisms that inhabit extreme environments.

Diversa says that because its enzyme is derived from a heat-loving microbe, ethanol factories can operate at higher temperatures and under more acidic conditions, improving efficiency.

Some people in the biofuel industry question what the advantage is of having the enzyme in the corn rather than just buying the very similar amylase that Diversa is already selling.

While Syngenta’s corn is meant for industrial use in the United States, it is almost inevitable that some of it will get into human and animal food supplies, including exports, because of cross-pollination or seed intermingling. That is what happened in 2000 with Aventis CropScience’s StarLink corn, which was approved only for animal use, yet ended up in human food, forcing recalls and disrupting exports.

To prevent such liability, Syngenta is seeking approval of the corn for human and animal food use, not only in the United States but in Europe, South Africa and elsewhere. Syngenta says the amylase enzyme is safe, noting that these enzymes are found in saliva.

But Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group in Washington opposed to biotechnology crops, said that this particular amylase is from a little-studied exotic microbe and that some amylase induces allergy.

The Agriculture Department has asked Syngenta for more information on its application.

Regardless of what is done to corn, some experts say that starch alone will not provide enough ethanol. The new frontier is to produce ethanol from cellulose, the fibrous material in all plants. Cellulose is made of complex carbohydrates that can be broken down by enzymes into simpler sugars for fermenting into ethanol.

While some of the cellulose for biofuels could come from agricultural residue like corn stalks, there will probably be a need for other crops grown specifically for energy production — in particular, perennial plants like grasses that require far less energy-consuming irrigation and fertilization than crops like corn that have to be replanted each year.

That is why Ceres, a privately owned supplier of genetics technology to Monsanto, sees a future in switch grass. The company’s greenhouses are filled with versions of tall, gangly grass plants, some developed by conventional breeding and some by genetic engineering.

The grasses are meant to have higher yields, to withstand drought or to break down easily in the ethanol factory — “the energy crop that melts in your mouth, if you will,” Mr. Hamilton said.

Ceres, based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., is not working with Monsanto on switch grass but is collaborating with the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation in Ardmore, Okla., a leading research institute on forage grasses. Mr. Hamilton said the partners were already testing conventionally bred switch grass varieties that yield eight or nine tons of biomass an acre, compared with about five tons for typical switch grass.

Mendel Biotechnology, based in Hayward, Calif., is looking more at miscanthus, a perennial grass native to China, where Mendel has set up an operation.

The company said miscanthus could produce well over 20 tons an acre each year. “No planting, no fertilizing, no irrigation,” said its chief executive, Chris Somerville, who is also the director of plant biology at the Carnegie Institution and a Stanford University professor. “You can just cut it every year for 10 years.”

Another cellulose candidate is poplar, which recently became the first tree to have its entire genome sequenced, an effort led by the Energy Department.

At first, significantly higher-yielding cellulose sources can come from conventional breeding, experts say. But later, genetic engineering may be needed. That could raise concerns because trees and grasses live longer and spread more easily than currently engineered crops like corn and soybeans.

And yet, energy crops may also be an opportunity for the industry to burnish its public image.

“After all,” the journal Nature Biotechnology said in a recent editorial, “it’s difficult to oppose a technology that’s helping to save the planet

Plans for more methane projects in rural China

BEIJING, -- The Chinese government will fund 2.6 million more rural households to build methane pits, which provide clean energy and protect local environment, in 2007, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Wei Chao'an, vice minister of agriculture, said that the 2.6 million rural households would be selected from the western and major grain producing regions in the country.

The government will grant a subsidy ranging from 800 yuan (about 100 U.S. dollars) to 1,200 yuan for each household to build one pit, in view of their locations, Wei said.

Governmental statistics show that a total of 18 million rural families had each built a methane pit by the end of 2005.

An eight-cubic-meter methane pit can provide 80 percent of the energy used by a four-member family in cooking annually. The 18 million methane pits produce energy equivalent to 10.9 million tons of coal and save 3.96 million hectares of forest.

Since the 1970s, China has been promoting the use of methane pits to process rural organic wastes.

Dunghill, which were common in most of rural China in the past, are no longer seen in places where people have built methane pits.

Wei said, methane pits changed human and animal wastes into "treasure"-- the gas generated in the pits is piped out for cooking, heating and even for lighting.

In the mean time, methane pits also serve as an important method to control spread of schistosomiasis and pig-borne bacteria streptococcus suis as well as other diseases in rural area, Wei said, adding that test shows methane pits can completely kill schistosome eggs.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, there would be 50 million methane pits by 2010.

According to plan, the Ministry of Agriculture will select 10,000 villages to conduct pilot energy recycling projects, which are expected to popularize the use of clean energy and raise the treatment of wastes in rural areas.

'Farming our fuel'

America, meet your next tank of gas -- made from superpowered seeds.

A couple of Orlando entrepreneurs say that a Malaysian variety newly approved for U.S. import could help solve America's energy woes and boost Central Florida's economy with a new cash crop.

State Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, along with executives from the Orlando-based Xenerga Inc., are scheduled to introduce a patented version of the jatropha plant today in Tallahassee.

"We're doing things right here in Orlando that are going to change America," said Dave Jarrett, a company spokesman. "Just wait and see."

The oil pressed from the jatropha nut can be used to make biodiesel, producing six to eight times the amount of energy extracted from soybeans -- the most common crop used for biodiesel in the U.S.

Xenerga president Jason Sayers and his business partner Victor Clewes have the exclusive patent on the high-octane version of the plant with seeds that grow inside bunches of fat green pods the size of peach pits.

It can produce 1,600 gallons of biodiesel per acre, compared with soy's 200 gallons, Sayers said.

A Lake Wales farmer is ready to grow 5,000 acres of the genetically enhanced jatropha, Jarrett said. And unlike soy, which takes lots of tending, fertilizer and water, the jatropha plant can grow happily in arid soil, with little water and almost no tending.

"Think of it as farming our fuel," Sayers said.

President Bush mandated that refineries should have renewable fuels blended into 7.5 billion gallons of the nation's fuel supply by 2012.

Only about 75 million gallons of biodiesel were sold in the U.S. last year, compared with about 6 billion gallons of petroleum diesel, according to the National Biodiesel Board, a trade organization.

"Biodiesel is huge in Europe and Asia," Sayers said. "America is just now catching up."

So Sayers and his associates are also launching a venture with Xenerga that will sell prefabricated mom-and-pop biodiesel refineries for about $2 million.

Their plan is to sell turnkey operations, manufactured in Germany and shipped here, and promise a steady supply of raw materials and customers. They have contracts to build about 16 of the refineries. Each refinery, if running at capacity, can produce 5 million gallons of biodiesel a year. Jarrett said they already have a slew of inquiries and expect to have 100 refineries throughout the country up and running in 18 months.

Besides the jatropha nut, his other sources will include a plentiful supply of restaurant grease. Through Sayers' other business, FiltaFry, which cleans restaurant fryers, he spotted a potential energy source in leftover grease.

The National Biodiesel Board said the industry is growing fast, with about 90 plants operating now and another 60 under construction.

While Xenerga won't have its first plant, in Kissimmee, up and running for two more months, Silver Bullet Energy has a small plant in Groveland that started making biodiesel this year out of grease extracted from sewage.

Another company, Southeast BioDiesel, plans to make about 6 million gallons of fuel a year from restaurant grease or soybean oil. It expects to be up and running in Sanford this summer.

And MetroWest developer and entrepreneur Kevin Azzouz said he's getting into the business with a company called Clean Fuel. He envisions using restaurant grease at a plant in Orange County that would create about 400 jobs.

Azzouz already made the rounds to potential customers, including Orange County Public Schools, which runs 1,000 buses each school day using a total of 14,000 gallons of diesel.

"We buy our diesel by the tanker-truck load," said Arby Creach, a transportation manager for Orange County schools.

School Board member Karen Ardaman said that biodiesel is promising, especially if produced locally.

"If it's cost-effective, hopefully it would help us stretch our dollars," she said.

Byproduct of biodiesel effective in poultry feed

Researchers at Iowa State University and the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Services are studying a biodiesel by-product in poultry and swine feed.

Biodiesel often is made from soybean or vegetable oil, with crude glycerin the resulting by-product. This compound, which currently is used in such things as hand lotions, cosmetics and shampoo, is a pure energy source.

According to Mark Honeyman, animal science professor and coordinator of Iowa State's Research Farms, with an increase in biodiesel production comes a surplus of crude glycerine.

Brian Kerr, an ARS research leader and collaborating associate professor of animal science, directed the glycerin feed trials Metabolism trail with laying hens
Kristjan Bregendahl, assistant professor of poultry nutrition, conducted a metabolism experiment with 48 laying hens. Typical feed rations that included corn, soybean meal, meat and bone meal, and four levels of crude glycerin - 0, 5, 10, or 15% - were fed to the hens to determine the energy value of the glycerin.

Trial results
"We found the energy in crude glycerin was used with high efficiency by the hens," Bregendahl said. "And we saw no adverse effects on egg production, egg weight, egg mass or feed consumption in this short experiment."
However, the consistency of the feed was an issue. Bregendahl described the laying-hen diets that included 10-15% crude glycerin as "rather sticky." Honeyman said that the 10% inclusion level of glycerol may be the upper limit.

Caution when using glycerin
Another issue was that when biodiesel is produced from soybean oil, methanol is used in the process. Methanol can be toxic, so Honeyman said swine and poultry producers interested in trying glycerin as part of a feed ration would need to work with the biodiesel plant to make sure methanol levels are below the Food and Drug Administration approved level of 150 parts per million in the glycerol.
Iowa State researchers, have a series of funding proposals in the works to further examine the use of crude glycerin in diets for nursery and finishing pigs, sows, broilers and layers.

Global Warming: It's About Energy

Global warming is an energy problem, and we cannot have both an increase in conventional fossil fuel use and a habitable planet. Yet the United States is projected to consume 35 percent more oil, coal, and gas combined in 2030 than in 2004.

Finally, after years of effort by dedicated scientists and activists like Al Gore, the issue of global warming has begun to receive the international attention it desperately needs. The publication on February 2 of the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), providing the most persuasive evidence to date of human responsibility for rising world temperatures, generated banner headlines around the world. But while there is a growing consensus on humanity's responsibility for global warming, policymakers have yet to come to terms with its principal cause: our unrelenting consumption of fossil fuels (primarily coal, fuel oil and natural gas).

When talk of global warming is introduced into the public discourse, as in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, it is generally characterized as an environmental problem, akin to water pollution, air pollution, pesticide abuse, and so on. This implies that it can be addressed - like those other problems - through a concerted effort to "clean up" our resource-utilization behavior, by substituting "green" products for ordinary ones, by restricting the release of toxic substances, and so on.

But global warming is not an "environmental" problem in the same sense as these others - it is an energy problem, first and foremost. Almost ninety percent of the world's energy is supplied through the combustion of fossil fuels, and every time we burn these fuels to make energy we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; carbon dioxide, in turn, is the principal component of the "greenhouse gases" that are responsible for warming the planet. Energy use and climate change are two sides of the same coin.


Fossil Fuel Dependency

Consider the situation in the United States. According to the Department of Energy, carbon dioxide emissions constitute 84 percent of this nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Of all US carbon dioxide emissions, most - 98 percent - are emitted as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels, which currently provide approximately 86 percent of America's total energy supply. This means that energy use and carbon dioxide emissions are highly correlated: the more energy we consume, the more carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere, and the more we contribute to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

Because Americans show no inclination to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels - but rather are using more and more of them all the time - one can foresee no future reduction in US emissions of greenhouse gases. According to the Department of Energy, the United States is projected to consume 35 percent more oil, coal, and gas combined in 2030 than in 2004; not surprisingly, the nation's emissions of carbon dioxide are expected to rise by approximately the same percentage over this period. If these projections prove accurate, total US carbon dioxide emissions in 2030 will reach a staggering 8.1 billion metric tons, of which 42 percent will be generated through the consumption of oil (most of it in automobiles, vans, trucks, and buses), forty percent by the burning of coal (principally to produce electricity), and the remainder by the combustion of natural gas (mainly for home heating and electricity generation). No other activity in the United States will come even close in terms of generating greenhouse gas emissions.

What is true of the United States is also true of other industrialized and industrializing nations, including China and India. Although a few may rely on nuclear power or energy renewables to a greater extent than the United States, all continue to consume fossil fuels and to emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, and so all are contributing to the acceleration of global climate change. According to the Department of Energy, global emissions of carbon dioxide are projected to increase by a frightening 75 percent between 2003 and 2030, from 25.0 to 43.7 billion metric tons. People may talk about slowing the rate of climate change, but if these figures prove accurate, the climate will be much hotter in coming decades and this will produce the most damaging effects predicted by the IPCC.

What this tells us is that the global warming problem cannot be separated from the energy problem. If the human community continues to consume more fossil fuels to generate more energy, it inevitably will increase the emission of carbon dioxide and so hasten the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, thus causing irreversible climate change. Whatever we do on the margins to ameliorate this process - such as planting trees to absorb some of the carbon emissions or slowing the rate of deforestation - will have only negligible effect so long as the central problem of fossil-fuel consumption is left unchecked.


State of Denial

Many political and business leaders wish to deny this fundamental reality. They may claim to accept the conclusions of the IPCC report. They will admit that vigorous action is needed to stem the buildup of greenhouse gases. But they will nevertheless seek to shield energy policy from fundamental change.

Typical of this approach is a talk given by Rex W Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, at a conference organized by Cambridge Energy Research Associates on February 13. As head of the world's largest publicly traded energy firm, Tillerson receives special attention when he talks. That his predecessor Lee Raymond often disparaged the science of global warming lent his comments particular significance. Yes, Tillerson admitted, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were increasing, and this contributed to the planet's gradual warming. But then, in language characteristic of the industry, he added, "The scale advantages of oil and natural gas across a broad array applications provide economic value unmatched by any alternative". It would therefore be a terrible mistake, he added, to rush into the development of energy alternatives when the consequences of global warming are still not fully understood.

The logic of this mode of thinking is inescapable. The continued production of fossil fuels to sustain our existing economic system is too important to allow the health of the planet to stand in its way. Buy into this mode of thought, and you can say goodbye to any hope of slowing - let alone reversing - the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.


What to Do

If, however, we seek to protect the climate while there is still time to do so, we must embrace a fundamental transformation in our energy behavior: nothing else will make a significant difference. In practice, this devolves into two fundamental postulates. We must substantially reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, and we must find ways to capture and bury the carbon by-products of the fossil fuels we do consume.

Various strategies have been proposed to achieve these objectives. Those that offer significant promise should be utilized to the maximum extent possible. This is not the place to evaluate these strategies in detail, except to make a few broad comments.

First, as noted, since 42 percent of American carbon dioxide emissions (the largest share) are produced through the combustion of petroleum, anything that reduces oil consumption - higher fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles, bigger incentives for hybrids, greater use of ethanol, improved public transportation, car-pooling, and so - should be made a major priority.

Second, because the combustion of coal in electrical power plants is our next biggest source of carbon dioxide, improving the efficiency of these plants and filtering out the harmful emissions has to be another top priority.

Finally, we should accelerate research into promising new techniques for the capture and "sequestration" of carbon during the combustion of fossil fuels in electricity generation. Some of these plans call for burying excess carbon in hollowed-out coalmines and oil wells - a very practical use for these abandoned relics, but only if it can be demonstrated that none of the carbon will leak back into the atmosphere, adding to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

Global warming is an energy problem, and we cannot have both an increase in conventional fossil fuel use and a habitable planet. It's one or the other. We must devise a future energy path that will meet our basic (not profligate) energy needs and also rescue the climate while there's still time. The technology to do so is potentially available to us, but only if we make the decision to develop it swiftly and on a very large scale.

Are GM Crops Killing Bees?

A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous.

Walter Haefeker is a man who is used to painting grim scenarios. He sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. And because griping is part of a lobbyist’s trade, it is practically his professional duty to warn that “the very existence of beekeeping is at stake.”

The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein’s apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing — something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.

Organic is healthier - Kiwis prove that green is good

Kiwifruit vines grown under different regimes on the same Californian farm have produced fruit with almost identical levels of sugars and acids – but the fruit grown organically proved healthier.


Organically grown kiwifruit on the Marysville farm had significantly higher levels of vitamin C and polyphenols – compounds associated with health benefits including reducing cholesterol, improving circulation and preventing cancer.

The new research was carried out by Dr Maria Amodio and Dr Adel Kader, from the University of California Davis.

The researchers' comparison of organic and non-organic kiwifruit grown next to each other showed the organic fruit was darker and had thicker skin – likely to have developed as part of its defence against pests in the absence of pesticides.

The polyphenols, antioxidants that reduce the production in the body of harmful chemicals called free radicals, were 17 per cent higher in the organic fruit than in the fruit grown conventionally.

The organic produce was also found to have 14 per cent more vitamin C and greater concentrations of several important minerals such as potassium and calcium.

Writing in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, the two researchers said: "All the main mineral constituents were more concentrated in the organic kiwi fruit, which also had higher asorbic acid (vitamin C) and total polyphenol content, resulting in higher antioxidant activity."

They said it was possible that conventional growing practices use levels of pesticides that could disrupt production of phenolic metabolites in the plant that have a protective role in plant defence mechanisms. Another recent study overseas found that a pint of organic milk has 68 per cent more omega 3 fatty acids – important for normal brain functioning – than conventionally produced milk.

Integrated Pest Management

Integrated Pest Management or I.P.M. takes a slightly different approach to pest control. Where you may have reached for the chemical pesticides as your first defense, with I.P.M., that is your last choice. As the name implies with I.P.M., you integrate different pest control methods to keep the pests in check.

You aren’t trying to totally eliminate the pests, just keep the numbers low enough to prevent damage to your plants.

I.P.M. Can be simple or complex depending on what you are growing and how much area you are growing in. For the home gardener it is usually a pretty easy process, where for a large farmer it can get pretty complicated. The money saved in not using expensive pesticides will usually far out way the time spent setting up the system. Besides who wants to eat fruits and vegetables covered in pesticides.

A typical IPM system is normally designed around six basic components.

1.Acceptable pest levels Like I said at the beginning of the article you are trying to control the pests, not eradicate them. The idea here is that it can be virtually impossible to completely remove all the pests without using chemicals and even then it isn’t always possible as there are more pests just around the corner.

2.Preventive practices This involves selecting plant varieties that are best suited for your local growing conditions. Maintaining healthy plants is your first line of defense.

3.Monitor If maintaining healthy plants is your first line of defense, then monitoring the plants is the cornerstone. Visual inspections, insect traps, and record keeping are essential in determining a threshold level for the pests that can harm your plants. Knowing how many can be present for your plants to survive and thrive will be found by monitoring.

4.Mechanical controls When or if a pest reaches unacceptable levels, this is your first option for getting them under control. Some of the mechanical methods you can use are, hand picking, erecting insect barriers, using traps, vacuuming, or tilling to disrupt breeding and egg hatching and laying.

5.Biological controls Natural processes and materials can provide biological controls to prevent pets problems, with a minimal environmental impact. The main idea here is to promote beneficial insects that will eat the pest insects and planting companion plants that the pest insects will either want to eat instead or that will repel them.

6.Chemical controls This is the last resort if nothing else is working.

Purple grape juice could protect your heart

London: A glass of purple grape juice a day could leave you feeling in the pink. It is the most effective of all fruit juices at preventing heart disease and cancer, says a latest study.

It has long been known that fruits contain antioxidants called polyphenols which help to neutralise unstable oxygen molecules called free radicals. If left unchecked, these molecules can harm cells, playing a role in everything from ageing to cancer.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow in Britain wanted to see how much polyphenols remained once fruit had been turned into juice, reported the online edition of Daily Mail.

Professor Alan Crozier and other researchers tested 13 types of juice from a supermarket, including those made from pomegranates, grapefruit, apples, pineapples and tomatoes.

They were a mixture of 'not from concentrate' and 'concentrated' varieties.

A drink made from purple Concord grapes had the greatest level of antioxidants, with cloudy apple, tropical and cranberry juices coming in next, the researchers found.

Generally, the darker juices were best, with purple grapes having the highest levels of polyphenols, the researchers said in their study published in the 'Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry'.

NITROGEN CYCLE AND BIOLOGICAL PRODUCTION

Soil fertility and importance of nitrogen input
The inputs of nutritive substances to a soil have two fold character: to maintain and/or improve soil quality on one side and to nourish crop on the other side. The noted purpose can be provided by: green-dung (stubble ploughing) and manure, allowing organic matter to be decomposed biogenically in the soil. The present organic matter provides fertility, regulating water management and soil structure, at the same time. The origin and species of organic matter, green-dung or manure, determine their quality; the ploughed stubble contain mainly lingo-cellulose, poor in nitrogen, while the manure, dependently, again on origin and fermentation degree, include nitrogen, lesser (fresh with high straw share) or more (completely fermented).
Nitrogen level in agricultural soil is inadequate for both, the crop and present microorganisms, so it had to be added. The input of completely fermented manure satisfies the soil nitrogen quantity, despite its mineralization is continued, what prolong manure effect during three years (50% was consumed in first year of application and the rest was consumed during next two years). Additionally, the gradual input of mineral nitrogen, combined with manure, have to be done in agreement with degree of nitrogen output by crop. The presence of humus, acquired from organic matter decomposition, act upon water and minerals retaining, inhibits soil leaching, in a great level.
Unrestrained, overdose nitrogen input, without knowledge of present status inside of the soil, could lead to the crop overgrowing, it’s lodging and breaking. Unspent part of nitrogen fertilizer leaches to ground water, polluting water-flows. The observed facts underline importance of nitrogen for crops and soil fertility maintenance and possible risks of pollution, what bring ahead control of soil nitrogen content and its input, dictated by crop outputs. The control is going to be mandatory in Europe and in this purpose is developed N-min (mineral nitrogen) method, quick and cheap.

Nitrogen cycle in soil and pollution
The nitrogen is element absent in terrestrial minerals (the exceptions are a few phyllosilicates that contain ammonia substituted for potassium), but present in air as N2 molecule (gas). It has two outmost forms: NH4+1 and NO3-1, which are transformed by plants to a -NH2 form (amino group), all living systems’ essential. The living organisms incorporate nitrogen, although the non-living organic matter releases it. The both pathways substantially exist in soil. The soil nitrogen part, as segment of global nitrogen cycle represents potentially the most adjustable part and aught to be in equilibrium with carbon cycle, at disposal. The observed chain shouldn’t be disturbed, as well as, it could be easily made, in the course of nitrogen un-enclosing (soil depletion), leaching and microorganisms destroying (pesticide overdosing).
Nitrate and ammonium salts, regardless to their origin, tend to dissolve in the presence of even small amounts of liquid water in soil and afford to be leached. Mineralization of organic matter occurs sequentially, over gaseous intermediates giving nitrogen trace gas emissions. They are highly reactive; depending on oxidation degree, react with water and/or oxygen. The noted process is spontaneous. The upper observed nitrogen salts leaching and trace gas emissions could be regard as the pollution source of the first order (biological pollution), while the industrial waste could be regard as the pollution source of the second order (product of civilization).
At the soil under processing the two ways of nitrogen output occur: through emission of trace gases and organic forms (living systems). The intensity maintenance of noted nitrogen cycle could be provided by input of: organic residues, mineral fertilizers and presence of soil microorganisms. Meanwhile, the shifting of soil nitrogen and carbon cycles equilibrium (have to aspire to stoichiometric relation) result in deprivation of soil fertility. Then again, the restoring of soil fertility is truly distressing and mainly uncertain process.
Meanwhile, the nitrogen and carbon misplacing through volatile forms should be surpassed by production of huge amounts of oxygen via forest areas, as counterbalance to areas with intensive agricultural production. Additionally, in the aim of atmosphere protection from biological and industrial nitrogen and carbon dioxide emission, the equilibrium have to be restituted with spontaneous oxygen production by carbon capturing (photosynthesis).

Reuse of pig slurry as high-quality fertilizer

The European Life project “Ecodíptera” has been presented this week in Brussels by its consortium partners. This initiative involves a sustainable and innovative solution for pig manure. The technology applied within the project enables the use of fly larvae to transform pig slurry into a high-quality fertilizer and proteins.

The main idea of “Ecodíptera” is to showcase the viable use of the natural degradation process of animal organic matter in order to obtain the decomposition of pig slurry at an industrial scale.

The material process lies in the controlled use of the fly larvae capacity to grow in organic matter in decomposition. Adult flies, after a phase of feeding and maturation, lay eggs on different types of waste. After a phase of growth, the larva transforms itself into a pupa, remaining still until its birth as a fly. During this process, between 50 and 70 per cent of waste is degraded, being incorporated to the biomass of the larva. However, the rest of the waste is also modified into a high quality organic fertilizer by the secretion and fermentation that takes place after the larvarian action.

The Valencian Region, leader in receiving LIFE EU funds

The seminar, which has taken place at the Committee of the Regions, has been led by the Valencian Regional Minister of Agriculture, Mr Juan Cotino, who has explained that the Valencian Regional government always supports projects that look for innovative solutions for agricultural problems in the region. “This projects is very positive to solve one of the worst problems that farmers have in our region, and in the European Union”, Mr Cotino has stressed. He has also emphasized the fact that, with this project, the Valencian Region keeps on being the EU leader region in receiving LIFE funds.

“Ecodiptera” is a three-year project co-financed by the European Union. With a budget over 1.5 million euros, it has been launched by six partners, under the leadership of the County Council of Valencia. The Fundación Comunidad Valenciana – Región Europea and the consulty agency network of Valencian Municipalities towards Sustainability “Ambienta” are the partners undertaking the communication and dissemination tasks of the programme at a local, regional, national and international level.

The rest of the partners - the University of Alicante, the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the University of Helsinky- are in charge of developing the necessary bases for the building of the pilot plant for the bio-degradation of pig manures, which will be located in Tuéjar, in the Region of Los Serranos, in Valencia.

The project is part of the European Programme LIFE Environment, launched in 1992, and contributes to the implementation, development and enhancement of the environment policy of the European Union.

Conserve Water Efficiently

The sharp rise in world population and income during the past five decades has stimulated greatly increased demand for clean water, and concern about whether the supply of water would be adequate to meet these needs. Demand for usable water in the future will surely continue to grow at a significant pace unless steps are taken to reduce demand, while the supply of water could grow more slowly, especially if global warming reduced rainfall and increased evaporation of water. The best way to bring demand into balance with supply is to introduce much more sensible pricing of water consumption than is common in most countries.

Many discussions of water conservation create the impression that households are large and inefficient users of clean water for drinking, eating, bathing, and toilet flushing. That is a myth. About 40 per cent of all the freshwater use in the United States is for irrigating land for agriculture, another 40 percent is used to produce power, and only 8 percent is used for domestic use; these percentages are similar in other countries. Moreover, about a third of all the water used by households in rich countries goes to water lawns and for other out door purposes, so probably no more than about 5 per cent of the total demand for water is for personal use.

Water used is usually a poor measure of the net amount of water consumed since much water is returned either immediately, or after evaporation and condensation, to the source pool, where it can be used again. Thermoelectric plants use a lot of water for cooling purposes, but typically have a very high reutilization rate (about 98 percent). Household use is also efficient, with a reutilization rate of about 75 percent. As a result, neither power producers nor households are big net consumers of water. Irrigation of farmland absorbs much water since most irrigation systems have low reutilization rates. In California, the biggest water using state, irrigation systems have a reutilization rate of only about 40 percent.

Governments usually try to close the gap between the supply and demand of usable water by command and control policies that regulate water use, usually starting with households. Many local governments have introduced requirements for low flow toilet flushes, bans on lawn watering except during certain hours or days, requirements for more efficient household outdoor watering systems, and other water conserving regulations. None of these regulations do anything to economize on the water used by farmers and industry, the main demanders of water.

Water is wasted in many ways by all sectors, and regulations do nothing to affect the main source of wasteful use of water: the inefficient pricing of water. Most irrigation systems in the world price water through annual flat fees, and not through charges that rise with the water consumed. Often domestic water use is not priced at all, and when priced, flat fees are far more common than fees that depend on use. As with any other scarce good, water is wasted when the cost of using more is negligible.

The obvious solution is to implement fees that rise with the amount of water demanded. Such fees are especially important in the agricultural sector since farming is a heavy consumer of water. Consumption ideally would be defined as net use after reutilization is accounted for. With this measure, the fee per gallon of water used would be low to power plants since they recover almost all the water they use. Farmers would tend to pay a lot both because they typically use much water, and also because most agriculture irrigation systems do a poor job of recovering the water used.

Fees that rise with consumption would reduce the demand for water partly by cutting demand. For example, households would water their lawns less frequently, and sometimes would replace natural grass with artificial grass, or with rock gardens and trees, Farmers would cut their demand for water by switching away from crops that require much water, such as rice, toward crops that need less, such as wheat. They would also switch to more efficient irrigation systems, such as spraying and dripping rather than flooding (which is the cheapest), if the price of water took account of reutilization rates. With proper water pricing, California and other regions that need expensive irrigation system to grow rice and other water-intensive crops would switch to other crops, or to other uses of their land, so that water-intensive crops would become more concentrated in areas with abundant water supplies. More generally, with sensible water pricing in different countries, arid parts of the world would not grow food that absorbs much water, and would shift to other crops and activities that they would exchange for these foods.

Some opponents of effective metering of water demand claim that it would not reduce the use of water because of the mistaken belief that most of the water used goes to households for drinking and personal hygiene. The demand for water for personal use may not be very responsive to price, but households in developed countries use lots of water for lawns and swimming pools that would be sensitive to the price of water. Also public and private golf courses and some other recreational facilities require much water, and these uses too would respond to higher water costs. Clearly, the use of water in agriculture and industry would be sensitive to its price.

Effective water pricing is even more important to poor countries since they cannot afford expensive methods of increasing the supply of usable water, such as desalinization, and since a large fraction of their water is used in agriculture with inefficient irrigation systems. Yet most poor countries make little effort to price water sensibly.

Implementation of significant fees is not easy politically since households and farmers believe they have a right to as much water as they can get. In particular, farmers in richer countries are well organized politically, and often resist efforts to raise the cost of water they use to irrigate their land. Perhaps their opposition could be weakened if they received generous reductions in their water fees when they introduce irrigation systems with high reutilization rates.

Tea as Fertilizer

Tea is used as potting mix

In all industries there are always left over or waste products. Tea manufacturing industries throw out lots of waste teas, daily, as left over. The employees working in tea industry would take the waste home for their gardens, however, some tea manufacturing industries selling these wastes to employees or farmers! Nowadays, the waste tea has been mixed with horse stable manure from the local racing stables, sandstone sawdust from a nearby stand stone quarry and sand. This mixture constitutes a fertile potting mix that is utilized in their nursery where they cultivate the tea plants from seed harvested from the full-grown tea plants on the cultivated area.

Tea is used as vermicompost

India is one of the leading nations, which produces bio fertilizers in huge amount. Tata companies in India are reprocessing and using their waste in innovative ways. The used tea waste from the instant tea processes of the company is transformed to vermicompost on the estates. The method of vermicomposting that the industry attempts ensures a plant–soil cycle thereby facilitating to build vital soil fauna and flora as well as adding to the organic matter content of the soil for enhanced nutritional effectiveness and uptake.

Tea is used as compost tea

All the gardeners know compost is wonderful stuff; however, there is something still better than simple old compost, and that is compost tea. The compost tea is prepared by immersing compost in water. Based on where your plant has problems, it is used as either a foliar spray or a soil drench. Tea waste is also used to prepare compost tea. Compost tea assists to inhibit foliar diseases, increases the quality and quantity of nutrients accessible to the plant, and accelerates the breakdown of toxins. It will influence the plant more rapidly than compost mixed into the soil. The conversion of compost into compost tea cannot ameliorate on the actual quality of the compost.

Tea is used as source of potassium

Ash of old tea plants is a prospective resource of potassium, an essential nutrient for plant growth. Since ash is alkaline, tea plants do not profit from the supplementary alkalinity, except for extremely acidic soils. Rather than using the ash on the plantations, it should be used on the soil of the trees grown from fuel plantations, which will enhance fertility in the fuel-wood farming. The use of compost and organic matter can decrease the necessity for inorganic fertilizers.

Tea is used as medium for mushroom cultivation

By growing mushrooms on tea waste, you can maintain double-figure economic growth without wearing natural resources. Mushrooms grow much faster in tea waste than in the normal method. It is not necessary to cut down trees to cultivate mushrooms. A mixture of tea waste with peat in 1:1 (v:v) ratio improved the yield of mushroom.

The other uses of tea waste

Tea waste is virtually as rich in effective antioxidants, such as catechins. Chagra, the used tea leaves, is used to enhance the roses. Remnant brewed tea may be cooled and used to water houseplants on occasion, and infused tea leaves may be scattered in the flower garden for a nutrient hike. It may be scattered all around the gardens. Tea waste can be used as a fertilizer for both indoor and outdoor plants.

Free Trade Doesn't Help Agriculture

The most forceful justification for agricultural subsidies is that they are needed to save small farmers and preserve a way of life. The current agricultural subsidy system in rich countries, however, has only contributed to the decline of the countryside both in the North and the South. There is thus a contradiction between the purpose and consequence of subsidies making it obvious that there is an urgent need to move in a different direction.

The nearly U.S. $1 billion daily that rich countries spend on subsidies don't go to farmers who resemble John Steinbeck's Joad family. Far from benefiting small farmers, subsidies go overwhelmingly to large, capital-intensive agriculture as support is closely linked with production levels and land ownership. Most family farms get nothing but a tax bill.

In the United States, family farmers have been sold out to corporate agribusiness with ever-increasing numbers of farm bankruptcies and foreclosures reaping a grim harvest of suicides, alcoholism, and a loss of community. Subsidizing well-heeled agribusiness interests has ensured the continued exodus of independent family farmers from the land. In the 1930s, 25% of the U.S. population lived on the nation's 6 million farms. Today America's 2 million farms are home to less than 2% of the population. The U.S. Department of Labor projects that the largest job loss among all occupations between 1998-2008 will be in agriculture. This is not surprising when the average farm-operator household earns only 14% of its income from the farm and rest from off-farm employment. A New York Times article in 2002 reported, "The biggest economic collapse is happening in counties most tied to agriculture, in spite of the subsidies." Out of the poorest 50 counties in the United States, 49 are rural counties.

In France, subsidies are skewed toward the rich farmers as well, with 15% of farms receiving in excess of 20,000 euros accounting for 60% of total payments. At the same time, the peasant population has declined by one third, with the number of suicides in the French countryside increasing rapidly.

This agricultural system robs not just the family farmers in rich countries but the world's poor. Today rich countries like the United States are bound under the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations to commit to reducing domestic and export subsidies, increasing market access, and governing agriculture trade with more rigorous disciplines on domestic farm policies. However, the federal government has been doling out an average of $11.3 billion annually between 1995 and 2004. More than 90% goes to producers of corn, cotton, wheat, rice, and soybeans, with just 10% of farms receiving 74% of these subsidies. These five crops are dramatically overproduced and sell on global markets at below the cost of production, depressing the global commodity prices of crops that developing countries count on while wiping out poor farmers and enriching transnational food-industry giants.

The numbers are alarming. The United States provides 200 times more support in hidden export support than it declares, equivalent to $6.6 billion a year. The U.S. export price of wheat in 1995 was 23% below the U.S. cost of production; by 2001 the export price was 44% below the cost of production. In cotton, despite its higher production costs, the United States increased its world market share even when world prices fell to 38 cents a pound in May 2002. Africa lost about $300 million, with Mali and Benin losing more than their aid receipts from the United States, and Burkina Faso losing more than what it got in Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief. In 2003, around 28,000 U.S. cotton farmers received $2.4 billion, 13 times more than the entire GDP of Burkina Faso, a country where more than two million people depend on cotton production for their living. The result is a reverse Robin Hood effect: robbing the world's poor to enrich American agribusiness.

Agriculture is the source of livelihood for over 40% of people on earth. Most of these producers are small-scale and subsistence farmers who constitute 75% of the world's poor. This fact lends strategic urgency to the need to change an agricultural subsidy system in the North that shores up an unjust and unsustainable corporate controlled industrial food system.

First we need to dismantle one of the great myths that free trade helps farmers and the poor. It does not! Attempts to leave farmers at the mercy of the free market only hasten their demise. The focus on export crops for trade has meant increasing yields, with farmers becoming dependent on chemical inputs. Many have stopped rotating their crops, instead devoting every acre to corn, wheat, or some other commodity crop and creating vast monocultures that require still more chemicals to be sustained. This has destroyed our biodiversity. Vast industrial farms require costly equipment for planting and harvesting, increasing the capital intensity of agriculture. As costs rise, prices fall in markets flush with surplus. As prices fall, farmers need subsidies, which are available to big growers and agribusiness only. Land values and cash rents increase. This encourages heavy borrowing. Rich landowners get richer and young farmers cannot afford to get started. An agricultural bubble economy is created. Inevitably it crashes as subsidies fail to keep pace with falling crop prices. Farms go bankrupt. Free trade in agriculture starves our farmers.

Our right to food has been undermined by dependence on the vagaries of the free market promoted by the international financial institutions. Instead of ensuring the right to food for all, these institutions have created a system that prioritizes export-oriented production and has increased global hunger and poverty while alienating millions from productive resources such as land, water, and seeds. The "world market" of agricultural products simply does not exist. What exists is an international trade of surpluses in grain, cereals, and meat dumped primarily by the EU, the United States, and members of the Cairns Group. Behind the faces of trade negotiators are powerful transnational corporations such as Cargill and Monsanto, which are the real beneficiaries of domestic subsidies and international trade agreements. Fundamental change in this repressive trade regime is essential.

Not surprisingly then, farmers organizations and social movements around the world have denounced the liberalization of farm products promoted by the WTO and other regional and bilateral free trade agreements. Instead of trade, small farmers movements prioritize healthy, good quality, and culturally appropriate subsistence production for the domestic market and for the sub-regional or regional markets. These farmers' priority is to produce for their families and communities, then to seek access to the domestic market before seeking to export.

The Doha Round of the WTO will mean certain death for untold numbers of farmers who will face increased competition from foreign subsidized products when their agricultural tariffs are reduced. If this terrible situation occurs, t he developing countries should be able to defend themselves by not reducing their tariffs on food products and products of their small farmers, and should be provided a Special Safeguard Mechanism , a tool that allows developing countries to work against the practice of dumping that is killing peasants. Under this mechanism, a developing country can raise the tariffs on a product if there is an import surge of the product. And they should be able to choose for themselves the Special Products (SP) that are exempted from obligations of tariffs and domestic subsidies. In essence, designating products as SP means taking them out of the WTO. In addition the developing countries should also be able to revert to the use of quantitative restrictions, which they had given up in false expectation that the Northern countries would stop their protection. In the wake of WTO talks stalled at the mini-ministerial in June 2006, farmers groups worldwide, including the Asian Peasant Coalition, have already declared that all products are special products! This buffer would at least allow countries to protect their most sensitive sectors from tariff reductions, and therefore protect millions of farmers' lives.

Agriculture and food are fundamental to the well-being of all people, both in terms of access to safe and nutritious food and as foundations of healthy communities, cultures, and environment. To ensure this we need agricultural subsidies that support communities instead of supporting commodities. Instead of production- and price-linked subsidies, a fair subsidy system would ensure small farmers access to local markets, fair prices for their products, and, when necessary, credit and technical assistance. Such a system would support the development of cooperatives and promote the consumption and production of local crops raised by small, sustainable farms. It would ensure farmers' rights to land, seeds, and water; support conservation practices; and protect indigenous rights.

In short, this is about ensuring a new system of agricultural trade that would guarantee food sovereignty; the right of people and countries to define their own agricultural and food policies according to the needs and the priorities of local communities, including mechanisms to protect domestic food production; ensure strict control of food imports to stabilize internal market prices; and supply management systems to avoid dumping on the world markets.

SEZ's Lessons from China

While single-minded pursuit of exports has helped China touch record growth figures, millions have been left behind, besides incurring huge environmental costs. And without even the limited dose of welfare that China offers its poor farmers, India must wary of copying China’s SEZ-approach, writes Bhaskar Goswami.

9 February 2007 - China’s record economic growth rate fuelled by the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) is often advocated as the reason for India to adopt this approach. Since the 1980s, China implemented a series of measures and policies with the sole purpose of achieving rapid economic growth. As evidence over the years has shown, this single-minded pursuit of growth has lowered the efficiency and effectiveness of economic policies, besides incurring huge resource and environmental costs. The Chinese experience offers a valuable lesson for India.

Cost of Export-driven Growth

China has to feed 22 percent of the world’s population on only 7 percent of land. In July 2005, China’s countryside had over 26.1 million people living in absolute poverty and was home to 18 percent of the world’s poor, according to Chinese Minister Li Xuju quoted in the People’s Daily. Every year, an additional 10 million people have to be fed. Despite this daunting target, between 1996-2005, “development” caused diversion of more than 21 percent of arable land to non-agricultural uses, chiefly highways, industries and SEZs. Per capita land holding now stands at a meager 0.094 hectares. In just thirteen years, between 1992 and 2005, twenty million farmers were laid off agriculture due to land acquisition.

As more arable land is taken over for urbanization and industrialisation, issues related to changes in land use have become a major source of dispute between the public and the government. Protests against land acquisition and deprivation have become a common feature of rural life in China, especially in the provinces of Guangdong (south), Sichuan, Hebei (north), and Henan province. Guangdong has been worst affected. Social instability has become an issue of concern. In 2004, the government admitted to 74,000 riots in the countryside, a seven-fold jump in ten years. Whereas a few years ago, excessive and arbitrary taxation was the peasants’ foremost complaint, resentment over the loss of farmland, corruption, worsening pollution and arbitrary evictions by property developers are the main reasons for farmers’ unrest now.

UNEP worked with Google to produce before-and-after satellite images of a hundred ‘hotspots’ and integrate them into Google Earth.

Titled UNEP: Atlas of Our Changing World, Shenzen’s before and after pics are for the period between 1979 and 2004 are available through this program. (See: the UNEP site for more.)

While rural China is up in arms against acquisition of land, SEZs like Shenzen in Guangdong showcasing the economic miracle of China, are beset with problems. After growing at a phenomenal rate of around 28 percent for the last 25 years, Shenzen is now paying a huge cost in terms of environment destruction, soaring crime rate and exploitation of its working class, mainly migrants. Foreign investors were lured to Shenzen by cheap land, compliant labour laws and lax or ineffective environmental rules. In 2006, the United Nations Environment Programme designated Shenzen as a ‘global environmental hotspot’, meaning a region that had suffered rapid environmental destruction.

There’s more. According to Howard French, the New York Times bureau chief, most of the year, the Shenzen sky is thick with choking smoke, while the crime rate is almost nine-fold higher than Shanghai. The working class earns US$ 80 every month in the sweatshops and the turnover rate is 10 percent – many turn to prostitution after being laid off. Further, real-estate sharks have stockpiled houses which have caused prices to spiral and have created a new generation of people French calls “mortgage slaves” in an article in the International Herald Tribune on 17 December 2006.

The mindless pursuit of growth following the mode of high input, high consumption and low output has seriously impacted the environment. In 2004, China consumed 4.3 times as much coal and electricity as the United States and 11.5 times as much as Japan to generate each US$1 worth of GNP, according to the The Taipei Times. Some 20 per cent of the population lives in severely polluted areas (Science in Society) and 70 percent of the rivers and lakes are in a grim shape (People’s Daily). Around 60 per cent of companies that have set up industries in the country violate emission rules. According to the World Bank, environmental problems are the cause of some 300,000 people dying each year. The Chinese government has admitted that pollution costs the country a staggering $200 billion a year - about 10 per cent of its GDP.

While export-driven policy for economic growth has helped China touch record growth figures, the income gap is widening and rapidly approaching the levels of some Latin American countries. Going by a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China’s Gini coefficient – a measure of income distribution where zero means perfect equality and 1 is maximum inequality – touched 0.496 in the year 2006. In comparison, income inequality figures are 0.33 in India, 0.41 in the US and 0.54 in Brazil. Further, the rural-urban income divide is staggering – annual income of city dwellers in China is around US $1,000 which is more than three times that of their rural counterparts.

In certain areas such as asset distribution or years of schooling China’s levels of inequity are lower (i.e., more favourable) than India. However, when one looks at it at the aggregate level, the picture is different.

The levels of inequity in China have been rising through the last three decades, whether between rural and urban, within them, or on an aggregate basis.

According to Zhu Ling, between 1978 and 1995, the Gini coefficient of rural income increased from 0.21 to 0.34 and that of the urban from 0.16 to 0.28.

With the economy opening up rapidly post-1995 and also due the massive concessions that China was forced to make in order to join the WTO, the trend continues and the aggregate Gini coefficient in 2006 was around 0.5.

It is in this backdrop that India’s SEZ thrust must be seen. Following China, India is replicating a similar model where vast tracts of agricultural land are being acquired for creating SEZs and other industries. The September 2005 notification on Environment Impact Assessment is lax for industrial estates, including SEZs, and apprehensions of dirty industries coming up in these zones are quite real. Further, with drastic changes in labour laws favouring industry being considered, the plight of workers in these SEZs will be similar to those in China. Such a mode of development is environmentally unsustainable and socially undesirable.

Further, it is now widely acknowledged that Chinese exports have also been boosted by its undervalued currency, something which Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, terms as an “effective subsidy”. This is a luxury that Indian exporters do not enjoy. The argument for setting up SEZs to emulate China’s export-led growth is therefore questionable.

Is export-driven growth through SEZs desirable for India?

There is no doubt that exports play a significant role in boosting GDP. However in the case of a country with a sizeable domestic market, the choice lies with the producer to either export or supply to the domestic market. Ila Patnaik of the National Institute for Public Finance and Policy wrote in the The Indian Express in December 2006 that household consumption in India at 68 percent of the GDP is much higher that that of China at 38 percent, Europe at 58 percent and Japan at 55 percent. This is an important source of strength for the domestic manufacturing industry of India.

Given the high level of consumption of Indian households, it is quite possible that this rush is fuelled not by the desire to export out of the country but by the possibility of exporting from SEZs into the Domestic Tariff Area (DTA). The SEZ Act is also designed to facilitate this. Any unit within the SEZ can export to the DTA, after paying the prevailing duty, as long as it is a net foreign exchange earner for three years. It is therefore a win-win situation for these units.

The sops in a SEZ will reduce the cost of capital while labour reforms will ensure trouble-free operations. Further, given the considerable international pressure to reduce industrial tariffs, SEZs will be able to export to the DTA at highly competitive prices. This does not augur well for units outside the SEZs who will now face unfair competition. As cheaper imports have already played havoc with the livelihoods of artisan sector of the economy, cheaper imports into DTA from SEZs will also adversely affect the domestic industry. No wonder many of them now want to migrate into SEZs.

In a country with 65 percent of the population depending on agriculture as a means of livelihood, industry ought to be complementary to agriculture. Through SEZs however, industry is being promoted at the cost of agriculture. Valuable resources spent to create SEZs will be at the cost of building better infrastructure for the rest of the country, something that will affect both the domestic industry as well as agriculture.

Other lessons India could learn from China: Welfare

While the Chinese experience with export-driven economic growth definitely offers many sobering lessons, there are many other areas where India can learn from China. China has initiated a series of measures to arrest social tensions and rising inequality in rural areas. In April 2004, the State Council, China’s cabinet, halted the ratification of farmland for other uses and started to rectify the national land market. The Minister of Agriculture, Du Quinglin, promised “not to reduce acreage of basic farmland, change its purpose or downgrade its quality”.

China also abolished agricultural tax in 2006 and increased subsidy for food grain production by 10 percent. To boost rural income, the selling price of grain was increased by 60 percent in 2005. In 2004, out of a total 900 million farmers in China, 600 million received US$ 1.5 billion (Rs.6,630 crores approximately) as direct subsidies. 52 million of the Chinese farmers have joined in the rural old-age insurance system and 2.2 million received pensions in 2005. More than 80 million farmers had participated in the rural cooperative medical service system by the end of 2004, and 12.57 million rural needy people had drawn allowances guaranteeing the minimum living standard by the end of 2005.

India, on the other hand, either does not have any of these safety nets or is in the process of dismantling the few that exist. There is much to learn as well as unlearn from the Chinese experience. Until that is done, millions of poor across the country will be made to pay an even higher price than the Chinese did for following this flawed approach.

Conservation agriculture: the zero way

Brazilian farmers are at the forefront in the application of Zero Tillage, a cropping method that is greener, boosts productivity, and helps the climate. “Called direct drilling, no-tillage or zero tillage (ZT), the technique is in part praised for fixing carbon in the soil, thereby reducing the amount of carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas — released into the air. It also prevents soil erosion and therefore demands less irrigation” reports Bernardo Esteves. In general, the practice of zero tillage agriculture conserves soil and water resources by reducing erosion, partitioning water into groundwater instead of runoff, increases the organic content of soil, and helps fix carbon to the soil.

From the original article: "With the best systems you have over a ton of carbon sequestered [in the soil] per hectare per year. When you consider there are a hundred million hectares under ZT in the world, this is an awful lot of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere," says British agronomist John Landers, who has promoted the technology in Brazil since the 1970s.

It is also not only agricultural land and soils that are benefiting from ZT. By introducing ZT to the Cerrado region, there has been a dramatic decrease in deforestation rates, as farmers are less likely to cut down trees to open up new pastures.

For further details on ZT, I recommend reading the entire article, which is posted on SciDevNET (link) and in addition a rather interesting piece from the FAO, focused on ZT application in Asia (link).

Producing medicines in plant seeds

Using plants to produce useful proteins could be an inexpensive alternative to current medicine production methods. Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) at Ghent University have succeeded in producing in plant seeds proteins that have a very strong resemblance to antibodies. They have also demonstrated that these antibody variants are just as active as the whole antibodies that occur naturally in humans. By virtue of their particular action, antibodies are very useful for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. From this research, it is now also clear that these kinds of antibody variants can be used in medical applications and that it is possible to produce them in the seeds of plants, which can have enormous advantages over conventional production methods.

Production of biotech medicines
large number of today's medicines are made with the aid of biotechnology (and this number should only grow in the future). To do this, scientists use genetically modified bacteria, yeasts, or animal cells that are able to produce human proteins. These proteins are then purified and administered as medicines. Examples of such proteins are antibodies, which can be used, for instance, in the treatment of cancer. The conventional methods for producing antibodies work well, but they are expensive and have a limited production capacity. The high costs are primarily due to the need for well-equipped production labs and to the labor-intensive upkeep of the animal cells, which are needed as production units.

Plants: a possible alternative?

For a number of years now, the VIB researchers in Ghent - Bart Van Droogenbroeck, Ann Depicker and Geert De Jaeger- have been searching for ways to have plants produce useful proteins efficiently. Plants do offer a lot of advantages over conventional production methods. Because production with plants doesn't require expensive high-tech laboratories, scientists anticipate that, by working with plants, production costs will be 10 to 100 times lower. Another important advantage is that large-scale production is possible without having to make additional investments in expensive fermentors.

A good yield guaranteed

Several years ago, Geert De Jaeger and his colleagues succeeded in achieving a high yield of an antibody variant in plants, which had been very difficult to do up to that time. The trick the researchers used was to modify the plants in such a way that they would produce the antibody variant in their seeds. With their special technique, the scientists succeeded in producing seeds in which the desired protein is good for more than one third of the total protein amount. This is a huge proportion compared to other systems - normally, scientists succeed in replacing only 1% of the plant's proteins by the desired protein.

Plant seeds are especially attractive as production units. In addition to a high production capacity, they offer other important advantages over other parts of the plant. The seeds can be stored for a long time without losing the produced protein's effectiveness, so that a reserve can always be kept on hand. This means that the proteins can be isolated from the seeds at the moment that they are actually needed. With production in leaves, for example - or with conventional production methods - such lengthy storage is not possible: the protein must be isolated immediately after production. So, production in plant seeds provides the clear advantage of timely processing.

High production of an efficient antibody variant

The antibody variant that has been produced by Geert De Jaeger and his team has a very simple structure and has only one binding place for a particular substance. Bart Van Droogenbroeck and his colleagues, under the direction of Ann Depicker, are now showing that it is also possible to produce more complex antibody variants in large quantities in the seeds of the Arabidopsis plant. Over 10% of the proteins in the seeds of these plants are the desired antibody variant. As is the case with whole antibodies, these more complex antibody variants have two binding places for a specified substance. This close similarity to whole antibodies makes these antibody variants extremely useful for therapeutic and diagnostic applications.

However, the production of proteins in plants is completed in a different way than in humans. Therefore, to be certain that this different completion process does not affect the effectiveness of the potential medicine; the scientists have subjected the action of the antibody variant to an exhaustive battery of tests. These laboratory tests have shown that the antibody variants produced in plants are just as effective as whole human antibodies in protecting animal cells against infection with the Hepatitis A virus.

Do-It Yourself Liquid Fertilizers & Teas

One of the fundamental principles of organic gardening is to "feed the soil, not the plant." The idea behind this concept is that if you start with healthy soil in the first place, you won't need a lot of additional fertilizers. That's good advice, but sometimes even Mother Nature appreciates a little boost. Organic liquid fertilizers and teas are a good options, because they can provide plants with nutrients in a readily available form. Here's all you need to know to make your own.

Fertilizer & Tea-Making Methods

Inverted Plastic Bottle (with cap)
This passive method works well for making small quantities of very concentrated liquid fertilizer from plant leaves. Stuff the bottle full of leaves (see appropriate plants below) and top them off with a sprinkle of water. Drill a tiny hole into the bottle cap and screw it back onto the bottle. This is where the concentrate will drip out. Place the bottle, cap-side-down, over a small container to collect the dripping concentrate. After 2 to 3 weeks (maybe sooner) a dark liquid will drip out. Dilute the concentrate with 10 to 15 parts water.

Bucket & Strainer
This is another passive technique for making fertilizer tea. Fill an aged burlap sack or old nylon stocking filled with your fertilizer source and immerse it in a 5 gallon bucket filled with water. Add 1 ounce of unsulfured molasses (to provide a food for beneficial organisms). Cover the bucket and allow it to steep for the directed amount of time. When finished, strain off the solids by carefully lifting out the burlap or nylon stocking. The solids can be returned to the compost pile or worked into the soil. Fermenting times: plants = 2 - 4 weeks; manure or prepared fish emulsion paste* = 1-2 weeks.

Bubble & Brew
Use a bucket and a small aquarium pump to speed up the fermentation process. Using 3 ft. of aquarium hose, attach one end to a small aerating pump and place the other end at the bottom of a five gallon bucket. For more bubbles, use a gang valve (available at aquarium supply stores) to divide the airflow from the hose into three separate streams. All three hose streams should reach the bottom of the bucket. Fill the bucket with approximately 1 gallon of your compost, making sure that the ends of the hose are covered. Fill the rest of the bucket to within 6 inches of the top with water and add 1 ounce of unsulfured molasses (to provide a food for beneficial organisms). Bubble and brew for liquid fertilizer in 2-3 days. The brew will have a yeasty smell or a foamy top layer when finished.

Common Organic Liquid Fertilizers

Liquid Manures:
These are commonly made from cow, horse, sheep or poultry manure. Another great and often overlooked source of "barnyard" manure is the rabbit. Rabbit droppings contain one of the highest concentrations of nitrogen. They are small and compact and they don't have the pronounced smell that most other animal manures have.

To Make Your Own: Use the bucket and strainer method or the bubble and brew method. Strain out solids and dilute 1:1 with water before applying to soil or as a foliar spray.

Fish Emulsion:
This fertilizer is made up of the waste by-products of the fishing industry, namely the fish meal trade or the fish canning industry. Fish emulsion is high in nitrogen and contains readily soluble phosphorus and potassium. It should not be confused with fish meal, which is typically used as a soil conditioner and food for soil microorganisms.

To Make Your Own: If you are using fresh fish, you need to compost it separately in a 5 gallon bucket before you make it into liquid fertilizer. Add fresh fish and fill at least half of the bucket with browns like leaves, straw or sawdust. Add an ounce or more of unsulfured molasses to reduce odors and encourage beneficial microbials. Cover and let rot for 1-2 weeks, opening the bucket to stir and allow for air circulation every 2 days. Once the fish is well rotted, use one of the methods above to make liquid fertilizer. Seaweed can be added in at this time.

Seaweed:
Because of its low nitrogen and phosphorus levels, seaweed is often combined with fish emulsion before being applied as a fertilizer. By itself, seaweed is a rich source of potassium, but it is considered more of a growth stimulant than a fertilizer. It contains several important trace elements, specific carbohydrates and growth hormones that benefits plants. One way to use seaweed extract effectively is to soak seeds in it for 24 hours prior to planting. It can also be applied to the soil around young plants to increase root growth or sprayed on their foliage to increase chlorophyll content while discouraging sap-sucking insects.

To Make Your Own: Collect enough seaweed to fill a plastic trash can (or any container of your choice) half way to the top. The plant tissues will naturally contain some salt, but it's a good idea to rinse any excess salt off of the surface of the seaweed before putting it into the barrel. Top off the container with water and allow it to stand for 2 to 3 months. As the seaweed decomposes, the water will turn brown. Chopping it up into small pieces will help it decompose faster. The resulting liquid will be highly concentrated and should be diluted with water (1:1) before being applied. Dried seaweed is useful for making up smaller quantities or if you don't have access to fresh plants.

Rock Phosphate:
Phosphorus is the essential nutrient primarily responsible for healthy root development and fruit and flower production.

To Make Your Own: In order for it to remain suspended in liquid form, rock phosphate needs to be pulverized into a fine powder. Since most people lack the necessary tools to do this effectively, buying it is more practical for most gardeners.

Plant Extracts:
Comfrey, chamomile, yarrow and nettle all serve double duty in the garden. Not only can they be used for their herbal properties, but they also make wonderful all-purpose fertilizers that you can grow and harvest as needed.

To Make Your Own: Use any of the above methods to steep leaves into a concentrate or liquid fertilizer tea.

How Much & How Often
Like any fertilizers, organic liquid fertilizers should not be a substitute for healthy soil. Don't overdo it. Use them as a short-term solution when conditions warrant it, such as container gardening or when weather delays transplanting. Liquid fertilizers are concentrated and can burn a plant's leaves and roots. Always dilute them with water before applying them. Plant concentrates can be stored in a cool, dry place for a few months, but manure and fish-based fertilizers should be used immediately. Container plants can be fed 2-3 times per week and houseplants every other week during the active growing season.

Soil Drenches: Use liquid fertilizers to help build up microbial activity in soil and supply NPK to the plant's root system.

Foliar Feeds: When plants that have suffered serious root damage, or you need a quick fix of soluble trace elements, apply liquid fertilizer as a foliar spray to plant leaves.

How To Get Free Organic Fertilizer

There is little need to pay an arm and a leg purchasing fertilizer from your local nursery when there are plenty of ways to get organic fertilizer for your garden for free. The best part is that since it is winter, you should have plenty of time to make the contacts you need to ensure that you have more flowers and produce more veggies while saving you water (which saves you time and money) during this year’s gardening season. All it takes is a bit of time and energy. Here are several ideas how you can procure organic fertilizer at no cost to you:

Animal Waste: Farm animal waste can be an excellent organic fertilizer for your garden and there are a lot of places that will give it to you for free since they would otherwise have to pay to dispose of it. Keep an eye open for businesses that need to dispose of animal waste & then make a contact. Stop in when you see a riding stable & ask if you can pick up a container of fertilizer. Locate the feed store closest to you and ask if you can post a “wanted” notice on a bulletin board. Put an ad on Craigslist and you’ll probably be blessed with several contacts willing to provide your garden with plenty of fertilizer.

Yard Waste: If you didn’t get all your fall leaves picked up or still have some piles in the yard, stick them into black trash bags. Take a sharp object and poke some air holes in the bags, close them up and store them in a place where they won’t freeze. Doing this will get them to begin to decompose and they will be ready to dig into your garden space come spring.

Egg Shells: Saving the egg shells that you use during the winter, grinding them up and placing them into your garden soil is an excellent way to improve the soil in your garden. If you don’t eat enough eggs yourself, a simple trip to a local restaurant that serves breakfast should give you plenty. All you need to do is politely ask and most places will give you the used shells as they would otherwise be thrown out with the trash.

Wood Chips / Sawdust: You also want to keep an eye open for businesses that work with wood for sawdust and wood chips. Both of these make great mulch and will cut down on the need to water your garden as often.

Coffee Grinds: Coffee stands regularly need to dispose of used coffee grounds, and while there is no real proof they provide nutrients to your soil, they do seem to add a non clumping sort of texture to my garden. Living in Starbucks land as I do (the Pacific NW), coffee grounds are prolific and again - free.

The remaining weeks of winter will barely be long enough if you start on this list now so that you have plenty of organic fertilizer when spring comes. Take a bit of time to make the contacts and watch your garden bloom and produce as it has never done so before this planing season.