#increase yields

[mobiloitte7]

Empowering Agriculture with Digital Solutions

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[fisheito]

@requiodile EXACTLY my thoughts !!!! rei's too old and tired and will probably have to clean the loads outa his butt for the next several hours. yakumo can carry HIMSELF back home after wreaking that kind of destruction

[botanyshitposts]

My family has a lime tree that's consistently fruited for as long as we've lived in this house and I don't think any of the neighbors have another. Have we just gotten lucky with animals pollinating it

ahh no, i was mistaken! wrote those tags and then second guessed myself. lemon and lime trees don't need a second tree to bear fruit, they can self-pollinate! i fixed the tags.

[ranuunculus]

what is your approach to colour? like how do you tackle colour. what are the though processes (/lack of) behind it

i am very unpredictable when it comes to it since I experiment a lot, no two pieces are the same. I often think about the subject I’m painting and what I want to convey in the finished piece (albeit subject to change).

I like to use very little colors and I put a lot of emphasis on contrast. IMO the less tones a palette has, the easier it is to work with it, so at most I will use three or four main tones coupled with gradients to keep things simple and quick.

I enjoy the red/black/white combination a lot and it shows, but different subjects call for different color stories…

[wanderingxrivers]

I tried growing red potatoes this year and they're smol but I grew them and that's the most important bit.

[wambsgender]

i am once again thinking about the lammas hireling

[linguisticparadox]

(via @animate-mush )

So that’s basically how it went down

[farmerstrend]

Record 70Million Bags of Maize Harvest: How Government Policies on Fertiliser Subsidies Are Paying Off

“Discover how Kenya’s record maize harvest of 70 million bags is reshaping the nation’s food security, driven by government subsidies and favorable weather conditions.” “Kenya’s maize harvest hits an all-time high! Learn about the factors behind the bumper crop and its impact on the country’s agricultural future.” “Explore the success story of Kenya’s maize harvest reaching 70 million bags,…

[robotsprinkles]

I'm such an idiot

(<- is trying to calculate how much energy there is per kg or litre of energon based on that one g1 episode that says a single energon cube is made up of 1000 barrels of crude oil for stupid reasons)

I'm obviously not making a single energon cube weigh as much as a thousand barrels of oil ( because that'd be stupid

(I say as I'm making one energon cube have as much energy as 1.12 kilotons of tnt — which is I think something like a twentieth or a fifteenth the yield of the hiroshima bomb — based off a one-off line from an episode of g1 which. uh. yeah)

also. Full admission, I've got no idea what I'm doing and I'm just basing all this off what I can find off the internet (I'm not studying anything related to physics or even chem and I dropped physics halfway through year 11 or thereabouts so)

(does this count as matpatting? or death battling? I think it does but also I'm stupid and want to incorporate as much semiplausible-sounding-yet-still-stupid science jargon and numbers that maintain some level of consistency as possible into my fic because I'm an idiot)

[puroxipurewater]

In a healthy greenhouse, you can increase plant yields, lengthen the growing season, care for delicate seedlings, and even grow plants that aren't usually compatible with your climate zone and humidity levels.  Here are some simplest ways to increase productivity if you're a greenhouse gardener looking for quick fixes to improve your greenhouse.  These pointers will help you get ahead of the curve and ease your life later on if you are just starting your greenhouse.

[valiumvenus]

In the name of my friends, I am asking for help:

"Please SIGN and SHARE this petition against censorship at the University of Vienna! Give us back our lectures on Palestine!" 🇵🇸🕊️

TLDR: The University of Vienna is canceling lectures about Palestine, and disinviting scholars who have a pro-Palestinian stance; please sign & share the petition to show people everywhere care. The students' demands are listed in the petition. Anyone can sign.

Censorship surrounding topics of Palestine is nothing new - but in the last few months there has been an alarming increase in censorship, where artists have their exhibitions shut down, universities are setting up barriers to knowledge about Palestine, highly unserious articles with very serious accusations about academics are popping up, ... Now two lectures on Palestine were canceled, and another scholar was just uninvited for what he posted on his social media (pro-Palestinian content). A previous protest letter from the academic community was ignored by the University, and a recent sit-in there was met with an unnecessarily high number of police who intimidated the small group of protesters. That is the only reaction anti-Zionist protests yield. -> more info in the petition link

Why/How does the University of Vienna do this? Basically, any public criticism of the Israeli government is misconstrued as antisemitism. Then, the University disinvites the academics in question and cancels lectures, or forces lecturers to "adjust" their content. Scholars are being muzzled. The University doesn't want its students to learn about various perspectives on Palestine. Mind you, this is a public institution we're talking about.

The petition is intended to show the University that people disapprove of these practices. The argument of "safety" is brought up all the time, but at the same time, the University gladly erects barriers between their students and the valuable knowledge that would foster critical thinking and understanding. Palestinians are directly affected by this deadly apathy, and Muslim and Jewish people everywhere suffer from heightened antisemitism and islamophobia fueled by misinformation and myths. And at the end of the day, censorship is nothing but bad academic practice. It is an attempt to shape the minds of students by making information harder to access and to exclude scholars who talk about/are from Palestine. It's discrimination against Palestinians and it's shameless instrumentalization of Jewish trauma.

Anybody who is concerned can sign. Please share widely with any and all communities! The petition should go international! Every signature counts.

Say NO to all barriers to knowledge. 🇵🇸🕊️

[nunuisancenewt]

Bioethicists need to spend less time worrying about “ unknown unknowns” of future GMO projects and alot more worrying about glyphosate resistance

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A proposal to stop labelling carbon dioxide as a pollutant and instead celebrate it as a "foundational nutrient for all life on Earth" will be up for debate at the United Conservative Party's (UCP) annual general meeting(opens in a new tab) in November. The resolution, which includes abandoning Alberta’s net-zero targets, flies in the face of the scientific consensus(opens in a new tab) that carbon dioxide emissions created by humans burning fossil fuels is one of the primary drivers of global warming.  The increased temperatures, in turn, cause more frequent and extreme weather(opens in a new tab) like wildfires, floods, heat waves, storms and droughts.  A study published in Nature (opens in a new tab)found the deadly 2021 heat dome in BC that killed more than 619 people was amplified by climate change, and that other events like the fires that tore through Jasper this summer are made more likely and exacerbated by climate change.  The policy resolution put forward by the Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock and Red Deer South constituency associations says the carbon cycle is a biological necessity and "The earth needs more CO2 to support life and to increase plant yields, both of which will contribute to the health and prosperity of all Albertans."

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland @abpoli

[determinate-negation]

“Prior to October 7th, between 170-200,000 Palestinians worked in Israel (roughly 75% with work permits—with around 90% of these permits going to Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank). After October 7th, nearly all Palestinian workers were fired, their work permits revoked, and their range of movement, already limited, restricted even further. The economic damage has been immense particularly in construction and agriculture, where the majority of Palestinians had been employed (it is an aspect of Zionist cruelty that Palestinians—a highly educated people—should be confined to low-wage manual labor employment in two of the primary economic sectors which have been used to advance their dispossession). To provide the starkest example: the construction industry, which accounts for 6-7% of Israeli GDP was, as of December 2023, operating at only 30% of its pre-October capacity, and fully half of all building projects were on hold.

Although business interests were able to pressure the government to allow a paltry 8–10,000 Palestinians back to work in December, the short- and long-term solutions to the problem of Israeli dependence on Palestinian labor (and, indeed, for the Zionist it has always been a problem) appears to be the increasing importation of foreign workers from Asia and Eastern Europe, particularly Thailand and India. It should be noted that Israel has used debt—the result of exorbitant “placement fees” charged by recruiters in workers’ home countries—to trap many foreign workers in hyper-exploitative working conditions enforced by geographic isolation. This is the paradigmatic form of modern slavery. Even if cheap imported labor were to get the construction industry back on track, the war has also resulted in the downgrading of Israel’s credit rating, a sharp decline in imports and exports, the almost complete pause of its tourism industry, a snowballing cancelation of arms deals the world over and, in the case of Turkey, trade relations as well, yielding an almost 20% contraction of its annualized GDP.

With these numbers, it could be said that Israel’s present genocide against the Palestinians harms both its short-term and long-term economic interests, sacrificed for the drive to extermination. But the enforced economic obsolescence of the Palestinians must be understood as integral to the drive for their extermination. Employing the brute force of siege, Israel has succeeded in cutting many Palestinians off from much of the global economy—now, entirely in the case of Gaza, and increasingly so in the case of the West Bank. Even those who are able to run businesses with international clientele face delays or de facto bans from cash-transfer sites like PayPal, and imports, exports, and access to certain goods are all controlled and restricted by Israel. These restrictions limit access to raw materials, affecting the types of industry Palestine is capable of sustaining, and limiting prospects for economic development.

Palestinians' limited access to the global economy in turn nurtures a dependency on Israeli goods and employment. But this dependency cuts both ways—Israel has grown dependent on Palestinian labor, which renders Palestinians necessary to the functioning of the Israeli economy and also creates barriers against their total social exclusion (not only in the sense that this labor requires social interaction with the Israeli populace). As Bataille writes in The Psychological Structure of Fascism, “money serves to measure all work and makes man a function of measurable products. According to the judgment of homogenous society, each man is worth what he produces.” In capitalist society, productivity becomes the prerequisite to admittance to social life. To totalize race-based social exclusion, then, the target population must be rendered economically obsolete. “As early as 1895,” Fayez Sayegh notes, “Herzl was busy devising a plan to ‘spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment.’”

Nazi Germany understood this as well: the 1938 “Regulation for the Elimination of the Jews from the Economic Life of Germany” completed the work begun three years prior by the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews and other groups of their citizenship and enshrined racial classification and separation into law. “The Jewish middleman,” Adorno and Horkheimer write, “fully becomes the image of the devil only when economically he has ceased to exist.” In apartheid society, in which the target population is seen as subhuman, or at least undeserving of rights or consideration, the wage remains one of the last means of verifying their humanity: beasts may be productive, but they do not earn a wage. The attempted elimination of Palestinian labor from the Israeli economy marks one of the final steps on the way to their full dehumanization in the Zionists’ eyes, one that prepared the way for the present mass extermination.

Zionism is not, then, a race-based system of economic exploitation at its core, though it does benefit from such exploitation: it is, first and foremost, a program of land acquisition. We can see the dual attack on Palestinian economic self-determination and land ownership in Israel’s routine destruction of Palestinian olive groves. Settlers, often armed or otherwise protected by armed agents of the state, uproot, burn, or cut down olive trees, with increasing frequency since 2019. The aim is to drive Palestinians from their land by destroying the subsistence produced by the land itself and nurtured over centuries by Palestinian farmers, in an effort to “Judaize” the area. As Palestinians flee from unchecked violence, forced from their land at the barrel of a gun, Jewish settlements appear in their wake, strictly illegal but in practice facilitated by the state until they are eventually recognized and assimilated into the legally regulated regime of property. (The whole cycle of legalizing illegal settlements, in any event, is something of a formality as their existence and proliferation is the entire raison d’être of the Zionist project.) When Palestinians refuse to leave and cannot be forced, they are murdered.”

Jake Romm, Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of Zionism in Parapraxis Mag

[kiwicopia]

MDNI | Themetober: Wings

Swan!Sunday x Wildlife Rescuer!GN!Reader

CW: mentions of being a pet/caged, slight dubcon, clipped wings, mentions of an injury, stubborn!Sunday, mentions of mating/courting rituals, spooning position, cock warming at the end, creampie.

tags: @sweetchildcloud

Themetober Masterlist

Being a wildlife rescuer, you had encountered a plethora of sick, injured, and even orphaned animals. However, one specific rescue yielded some rather strange outcomes What seemed like a regular swan, presumed to be a captive pet due to his clipped wings, had, in truth, turned out to be much more than that.

The pretty and injured swan you had rescued ended up being a hybrid with clipped wings, and a stubborn one at that. How someone could keep a beautiful creature like him as a pet was baffling. However, despite all of his hissing and grumpiness towards you, Sunday eventually grew closer with you as his caregiver—attached in a way only a swan would ever be with someone. 

Honestly, you should have taken the signs a bit more seriously back then. The constant ruffling of his feathers whenever you were in his presence, the need to always be around you, the subtle attempts at grooming you with a brush and pampering you—all signs of courting. It wasn’t until he took drastic measures one morning, making you finally realize that he truly desired you. 

Sunday held you against him, his face pressed against the back of your neck as he slowly inhaled your scent. He had slipped into your bed that morning with only one intention: finally making you his mate for life. It was such a sacred thing amongst swans, and the thought of enacting it sent a shiver down his body. 

The feeling of being held roused you from your slumber, and his arms tightened around you when you tried to squirm out of his hold. “Don’t move,” he whispered. He moved his hips against yours, pressing his hardened length against your ass, letting you feel him entirely. “I’ve waited too long for this, but I had to be certain of my choice.” Again, he rubbed his cock against you, smearing small globs of precum along your flesh. “After all, swans mate for life.” 

Your body tensed when he moved an arm and lifted your leg just enough for him to squeeze inside of you. The hybrid let out a shaky breath before pressing a tender kiss to the back of your neck. “Sunday,” you groaned softly, followed by a slight whining sound as he buried himself fully. His hand let go of your leg before moving to rest at your hip, and he slid his other arm down to tighten around your waist, pulling you closer to him. 

His hips pulled back before moving forward, thrusting into you at a slow and repeated pace. “You feel so good,” he mumbled. His lips continued peppering the back of your neck in featherlight kisses before trailing them up to the space behind your ear, where he began to suck lightly on the skin. His thrusts increased slightly, and you let out a moan when his tongue slid over the teased flesh below your ear. “You were made for me.” 

Your body moved in tandem with his, rocking back and forth on the bed at a steady tempo, yet it soon increased when you moaned once more. Sunday’s hand gripped your hip a little tighter, his fingers digging into the skin as he switched his pace up. He pistoned into you a little faster now, his hips smacking against the back of yours as he huffed in your ear. 

As much as he desired to enjoy the moment and make it last, his instincts to mate you were overtaking him. The hybrid’s feathers tickled your cheek the faster he fucked into you with need, and your delicious sounds only served to spur him further. A strained hiss slipped out between clenched teeth as he slammed into you one final time, letting his cock twitch once more before spilling inside you. 

Sunday hummed softly, satisfied at the deed being complete. His hips moved against you once more, slower now, as his fingers traced gentle patterns against your hip. “There we go,” he whispered. His face nuzzled the back of your neck before kissing it softly once more. “So nice and full now.” 

His movements continued, growing lazier by the minute until he finally ceased altogether. The swan kept his cock inside of you, keeping his cum in your hole, not wanting a single drop to slip out. It was his way of marking you, claiming you as a lifelong partner. It was something he had longed to have for years, and he wasn’t the type to squander his chances and let them slip away. Not with you. 

Not with his precious, little desire. 

[mariacallous]

India’s $13.9 billion aviation industry—projected to cater to over 300 million domestically by 2030—is a ticking time bomb.

This July, in the sweltering heat at the Delhi High Court, additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati announced that new rules on pilot duty and rest periods would not be implemented this year after all. Introduced by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in January, the rules were designed specifically to combat pilot fatigue. They were set to take effect in June, but were abruptly retracted. The hearing addressed a writ petition filed by the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), seeking clarity on when the new norms would be enforced. The DGCA’s response followed its request to airline companies in April for a tentative implementation timeline.

Concerns over pilot fatigue had been mounting in the months leading up to the announcement of the new Flight Duty Period, Flight Time Limitations, and Prescribed Rest Periods by the DGCA. The urgency deepened in November 2023 when a 37-year-old Air India pilot, Captain Himanil Kumar, collapsed at Delhi Airport while training to fly the airline's Boeing 777 fleet, and later died at the hospital. Kumar was the second Indian pilot to die on duty within three months; in August, Captain Manoj Subramanyam, a 40-year-old IndiGo pilot, suffered a fatal cardiac arrest just minutes before his flight from Nagpur.

These back-to-back tragedies raised alarm in the industry. “Another young Indian pilot passed away today due to a suspected cardiac event,” reportedly tweeted Captain Shakti Lumba, a retired IndiGo VP who is now the president of the Professional Pilots Society in India (His tweet was since deleted.) “If this doesn’t convince the DGCA, civil aviation ministry, and airlines to urgently address the stress, fatigue, and anxiety among pilots, nothing will.”

The DGCA, India’s aviation watchdog, regulates the country’s Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL). At 13 hours of flight duty time, India’s FDTL is already demanding, but after the pandemic slowdown, increased route expansion and pilot shortages have forced many to fly beyond the recommended maximum of 60 hours a week, exacerbating crew exhaustion. The DGCA finally responded to the growing crisis by revising FDTL norms in January 2024.

The new guidelines increased weekly rest periods from 36 to 48 hours and introduced quarterly fatigue reports. Its scheduled implementation on June 1, 2024, was pushed back due to pressure from operators. An airline CEO, speaking anonymously to the Economic Times in January, claimed the proposed regulations would require a 20 percent increase in pilot numbers, which would escalate expenses and lead to huge numbers of flight cancellations. Still, the DGCA held firm on the FDTL implementation deadline till early March. By the end of the month, however, it appeared to have yielded to influence from the airline lobby. A notice on the regulator’s website announced the deadline had been deferred, without providing a reason or setting a new date.

The pilot fatigue problem isn’t unique to India. In January, two pilots for Indonesia-based Batik Air fell asleep for 28 minutes mid-flight, causing their plane to veer off course between Sulawesi and Jakarta. In April, unionized Virgin Atlantic pilots in the UK voted 96 percent in favor of pursuing an industrial action in response to rising fatigue. Earlier, the CEO of Wizz Air UK faced a backlash for urging crew members to push through their fatigue to avoid flight cancellations. In May, senior pilots at Virgin Australia raised safety concerns, claiming rostering systems were pushing them "to the limits.”

But in India, the belief that overwork and fatigue are not just acceptable but essential has become entrenched across industries. The aviation crisis is just the tip of the iceberg; it is the tech industry that is leading the charge. Last year, Infosys cofounder Narayana Murthy suggested that Indian youth should work 70 hours a week for the nation's development. Murthy’s advice came up at the Indian Parliament on the first day of its winter session and found support from a list of influential Indian tech leaders, including Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of India’s first AI unicorn, Ola Krutrim; Ayushmaan Kapoor, cofounder of the AI-powered customer platform Xeno; and even veterans like Sajjan Jindal, CEO and MD of JSW Group, and Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems. Almost all of them justified the extended work hours, which far exceed the maximum eight to nine hours per day stipulated by the International Labour Organisation and the Indian Labour Code, as necessary for strengthening India’s economy. “We have to make India an economic superpower that we can all be proud of,” Jindal wrote on X. He cited Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, “who works 14-16 hours everyday,”as a model. In July this year, the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employee Union said the state government had plans to increase working hours in the sector from the current maximum of 10 hours (including overtime) to a staggering 14 hours a day. As the union planned massive campaigns to oppose the move, the labor minister stated that the push for the proposal had come from the companies.

The airline companies think they have a solution to the fatigue crisis: technology. IndiGo, India’s largest airline, announced it would be an “early adopter” of a wrist-worn fatigue-monitoring device it was developing with French defense and aerospace company Thales Group. The device can provide “detailed insights into demographic data, including routes, pairings, crew profiles, and more, going beyond traditional scheduling-focused biomathematical models,” the airline stated in a press release in September. The airline, which operates 2,000 flights daily and employs over 5,000 pilots, said the device would be rolled out after a proof-of-concept trial. No date for the rollout was announced.

Wearable activity trackers are not new to the aviation industry. IndiGo’s device sounds similar to Actiwatch, a now-discontinued line of research-grade actigraphs from Philips, used to monitor sleep patterns, study circadian rhythms, and track physical activity as part of an airline’s fatigue risk-management system. But they partly rely on performance tests and subjective measures, such as self-reporting, which often results in being targeted by the airlines, says Captain C. S. Randhawa, president of the Federation of Indian Pilots. Safety management systems on the whole tend to be neglected by operators and are viewed as an additional expense, says Captain Amit Singh of the NGO Safety Matters Foundation.

In May 2023, Air India launched safety management software called Coruson, as well as BAM (Boeing Alertness Model), a fatigue-mitigation tool integrated into its rostering system, which is used by airlines to create and manage pilot schedules. Coruson, developed by cloud software company Ideagen, centralizes, analyzes, and reports on safety-related data—such as incidents, hazards, and risk assessments. BAM, developed jointly by Boeing and the software company Jeppesen, predicts and manages pilot fatigue by analyzing flight schedules and performance data. These tools were designed to prevent the creation of fatiguing rosters and pairings, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson noted in an internal message to employees. The carrier also introduced two new digital tools for its crew—the Pilot Sector Report app, to help pilots easily submit information on flight performance, incidents, and observations post-flight; and DocuNet, a digital management system that facilitates the storage, retrieval, and sharing of documents (such as flight manuals, training records, and compliance documents).

Despite these measures, the airline was fined by the DGCA in March this year for violating FDTL limits and fatigue management rules. This May, Air India Express cabin staff called in sick en masse to protest against “mismanagement.” This followed a similar protest from the crew, mostly pilots, at Vistara airlines. Both Air India and Vistara are now owned by one of India’s largest conglomerates, the Tata Group, which took over the former from the Indian government in January 2022.

Twenty-five of those who called in sick at Air India Express were terminated. Others were reportedly served an ultimatum. Those sacked were later reinstated by the airline following an intervention by the chief labour commissioner. Nearly a week before, the regional labor commissioner of Delhi had allegedly written to the Tata group chairman pointing to “blatant violations of labour laws” and insisting the legitimate concerns of the cabin crew be looked into. According to CNBC, Vistara employees said the agitation at their end had to do with recent salary updates, which fixed pilot pay at 40 flight hours—down from 70. Protesting first officers claimed that the new salary structure would result in an almost 57 percent pay cut. Under the new terms they would also have to fly up to 76 hours to earn what they were previously earning at 70 hours.

To placate the pilots and get them back to work, management had assured them that salaries for the “extra working hours” would be credited once Vistara was integrated with Air India. At the time, two Air India pilots unions had written to the chairman of the company, saying that such issues were not isolated but systemic. Burnout was the other related issue, with many pilots complaining of inadequate rest and being pushed to their limits.

Captain Singh, a former senior manager at AirAsia, tells WIRED that such effects significantly increase the risk of accidents, but also adversely affect pilot health in the long run. Tail swaps—rushing between different types of aircraft to take off immediately after disembarking from another—have become more prevalent under the 13-hour rules, and can further contribute to exhaustion, as do hasty acclimatization and, most significantly, landing three, four, or more flights consecutively, which Captain Randhawa described as a “severe energy management challenge.”

In the 2024 “Safety Culture Survey” conducted by Singh’s Safety Matters Foundation in July, 81 percent of 530 respondents, primarily medium- to short-haul pilots, stated that bufferless rosters contribute to their fatigue. As many as 84 percent indicated concerns with the speed and direction of shift rotation. “That’s the problem with the new rostering softwares the operators are introducing,” a pilot from a private airline, who requested anonymity, says. “They’re optimizers designed to make pilots work every second of their 13-hour schedule, leaving no breathing room.” The buffer-deficient timetables push pilots to their limits, so any additional pressure—like unpredictable weather—can easily overwhelm them.

Solving this issue with wrist-worn fatigue-measuring devices is contentious. But that isn’t the only problem. A year since they were hyped up, the buzz around fatigue-management tech has all but fizzled out. There have been no updates from IndiGo about the wrist device. Neither IndiGo nor the Thales Group responded to requests to comment.