#Agriculture around the world

[gardeningwithkirk]

The importances of our mountains

Mountains are ecologically important because they: Provide a haven for a broad spectrum of plant and animal species, making them biodiversity hotspots. Regulate climate by influencing air circulation, cloud formation, and precipitation levels. Act as sources of freshwater. Store and sequester carbon. Provide important goods, including wood, pastures for livestock, drinking water, and clean air.

[wisebeth]

why does the pjo series have to unnecessarily villainize goddesses (hera & athena) or show them as silly ladies (aphrodite & demeter) BUT posiedon and apollo are somehow shown as the coolest/most likeable gods, even though arguably, they're right after zeus on terms of corruption?

ares shown as the worst god after zeus and hera amuses me. last time i checked, he was the patron god of amazons and literally killed a man for attempting to rape his daughter but guess who cursed women for rejection? apollo. guess who raped women when they said no (aside from zeus)? posiedon.

[clodiuspulcher]

today im thinking about malaria in ancient rome.

about the fact that P. falciparum (the most dangerous kind of malaria) was likely endemic at least from the 2nd century BC onward that Galen said semitertian fevers (P. falciparum infections) were more common in Rome than anywhere else in the Roman Empire that the most severe manifestations of P. falciparum (quotidian fevers + cerebral malaria) were most common in babies and young children, an epidemiological observation that indicates the transmission rate of P. falciparum was extremely high in Rome that Quintus Serenus said there was no Latin word for semitertian fevers (they used a transliteration of the Greek, 'hemitritaeos') because "no one, i think, could have named it in our language and mothers would not have wanted to"

[sillylittlecandlestick]

Sammy pushing away her trauma with that “I've already forgotten” line is so real for a lot of farm kids, like damn.

[hella1975]

sometimes i think about the fact my grandparents literally overnight just cut us off and im like. how did u even do that. does it torment you

[deaney-md]

Rolling Green Hills Under Puffy White Clouds And Blue Skies.

[trans-xianxian]

do any of you know any good books about the history of gardening/agriculture that aren't just centered around europe/post colonial america? I'm looking for a gift for my bestie but all of the books I'm finding are just a history of white people farming 😭

[snakest1cks]

being extremely unhealthily invested in asoaif is the best decision ive ever made as a creator bc every time i spiral into “god i’m getting kinda handwavy with the chemistry of this world’s atmosphere” i get to say “there is a completely unexplained concept of “years” as a sub-unit of measurement within irregular-length seasons and NO discussion of how these years are delineated, understood, or conceptually developed AT ALL besides the assumption that they are the same length as Earth years AND the book is still good”

thank you grrm for setting the bar low

[iknowicanbutwhy]

12 hour shifts should be illegal. Holy hell.

[mariamagdalenaposting]

Thinking about that Skyrim meme that was like "Siding with the Imperials in the Skyrim Civil War because there is no way this agrarian society will industrialize under feudalism"

[reasonsforhope]

"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

[headspace-hotel]

I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.

[bogleech]

Simple lifeform facts I take for granted that I've now seen blowing people's minds on here:

That sea urchins walk around and have mouths with teeth on their undersides

That corals are related to jellyfish

Barnacles being related to crabs and shrimp

Ants being an offshoot of wasps

Termites being totally unrelated to ants and all similarities just being convergent evolution (they're actually a group of cockroaches, but even science didn't know that part until a few years ago)

Starfish having an eye at the end of each arm

That the bodies of ticks and mites are also their heads, essentially big heads with legs (they even frequently have eyes way up on "the body")

Sperm whales have no upper teeth, and also their bodies are flat from the front

Goats also having no upper (front) teeth

Tapeworms having no mouth at all and just absorbing nutrients over their entire body surface

That flies are bigger pollinators than bees

That moths are bigger pollinators than bees

That wasps are just as important pollinators as bees (more important to many groups of plants) and when we say they're "less efficient" at it we just mean individually they get a little less pollen stuck to them.

That honeybees are nonnative to most of the world and not good for the local ecosystem, just good for human agriculture

That earthworms are also nonnative and destructive to more habitats than the reverse

There being no hard biological line between slugs and snails; all slugs aren't necessarily related to each other and there are gastropod groups where some have shells and some don't

That ALL octopuses (not just the blue ring) have a venomous bite

Most jellyfish and sea anemones being predators that eat fish

"Krill" being shrimp up to a few inches long and not some kind of microbe

Blue whales therefore being the deadliest predators to ever evolve as they eat up to several million individual animals per day

That krill are still "plankton" because plankton refers to whatever animals, algae and other organisms are carried around by the sea's currents, not to any particular group of life or a size category

Fungi being no more related to plants than we are, and in fact more like a sibling to the animal kingdom if anything

Venus fly traps being native to only one small area of North America in all the world

Parasites being essential to all ecosystems

Leeches not having a circular ring of teeth anywhere

That algae is not a type of plant

That most seaweed is just very big algae

That enough wood ends up in the ocean that plenty of sea life evolved to eat only wood

Speaking of which the fact that the "ship worms" that make tunnels in wood are just long noodly clams

Butterflies technically just being a small weird group of moths we gave a different name to

That insects only get wings once they reach maximum size and therefore there can never be a younger smaller bee or fly that's not a larva

Spiders not being any more likely to kill their own mates/young than just a cat or dog might, for most species maybe a lot less often?

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Year - 2023 Edition

Welcome to our special edition newsletter recapping the best news from the past year. I've picked one highlight from each month to give you a snapshot of 2023. No frills, just straightforward news that mattered. Let's relive the good stuff that made our year shine.

January - London: Girl with incurable cancer recovers after pioneering treatment

A girl’s incurable cancer has been cleared from her body after what scientists have described as the most sophisticated cell engineering to date.

2. February - Utah legislature unanimously passes ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy

The Utah State Legislature has unanimously approved a bill that enshrines into law a ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy.

3. March - First vaccine for honeybees could save billions

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved the world’s first-ever vaccine intended to address the global decline of honeybees. It will help protect honeybees from American foulbrood, a contagious bacterial disease which can destroy entire colonies.

4. April - Fungi discovered that can eat plastic in just 140 days

Australian scientists have successfully used backyard mould to break down one of the world's most stubborn plastics — a discovery they hope could ease the burden of the global recycling crisis within years. 

5. May - Ocean Cleanup removes 200,000th kilogram of plastic from the Pacific Ocean

The Dutch offshore restoration project, Ocean Cleanup, says it has reached a milestone. The organization's plastic catching efforts have now fished more than 200,000 kilograms of plastic out of the Pacific Ocean, Ocean Cleanup said on Twitter.

6. June - U.S. judge blocks Florida ban on care for trans minors in narrow ruling, says ‘gender identity is real’

A federal judge temporarily blocked portions of a new Florida law that bans transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers, ruling Tuesday that the state has no rational basis for denying patients treatment.

7. July - World’s largest Phosphate deposit discovered in Norway

A massive underground deposit of high-grade phosphate rock in Norway, pitched as the world’s largest, is big enough to satisfy world demand for fertilisers, solar panels and electric car batteries over the next 50 years, according to the company exploiting the resource.

8. August - Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

If the claim by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea’s Quantum Energy Research Centre holds up, the material could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids.

9. September - World’s 1st drug to regrow teeth enters clinical trials

The ability to regrow your own teeth could be just around the corner. A team of scientists, led by a Japanese pharmaceutical startup, are getting set to start human trials on a new drug that has successfully grown new teeth in animal test subjects.

10. October - Nobel Prize goes to scientists behind mRNA Covid vaccines

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to a pair of scientists who developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines. Professors Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman will share the prize.

11. November - No cases of cancer caused by HPV in Norwegian 25-year olds, the first cohort to be mass vaccinated for HPV.

Last year there were zero cases of cervical cancer in the group that was vaccinated in 2009 against the HPV virus, which can cause the cancer in women.

12. December - President Biden announces he’s pardoning all convictions of federal marijuana possession

President Joe Biden announced Friday he's issuing a federal pardon to every American who has used marijuana in the past, including those who were never arrested or prosecuted.

------

And there you have it – a year's worth of uplifting news! I hope these positive stories brought a bit of joy to your inbox. As I wrap up this special edition, I want to thank all my supporters!

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

[xboxissues]

New Xbox Games for July 17th to July 21st 2023