#what is zero budget natural farming

[plugincaro]

How to do Zero Budget Natural Farming? | How to Farm | PlugInCaroo

Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) is a farming method that aims to promote natural and sustainable farming practices. Here are the steps to do ZBNF farming: Choose the right location: Look for a place with good soil, adequate sunlight, and access to water. Ensure that the soil is fertile and has good drainage. Here you are supposed to feed the soil with good bacteria so that it can feed the…

[liesmyteachertoldme]

Carbon Dioxide — The Gas of Life

Story at-a-glance

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is commonly mischaracterized as a harmful waste product of respiration and is falsely blamed for disrupting the planetary climate

CO2 is an essential gas necessary for life. Moreover, its impact on Earth’s temperatures is negligible, and will remain negligible even if the current concentration in the atmosphere were to double. A 100% increase of CO2, from 400 ppm to 800 ppm, would decrease radiation into space by just 1.1%, resulting in a 0.7 degree C increase of the average earth temperature

A 0.7 degree C difference means there’s no climate emergency, and no matter what we do to reduce CO2 emissions, it’s not going to impact global temperatures. To fabricate an emergency where there is none, it is assumed that massive positive feedbacks are involved. However, most natural feedbacks are negative, not positive, so isn’t it likely the 0.7 degree C increase is an overestimation to begin with

There’s no single temperature of the Earth. It varies by location and altitude. For every kilometer of altitude, you have an average cooling of 6.6 degrees C

Higher CO2 levels will green the planet, making it more hospitable to plant life. The more CO2 there is, the better plants and trees grow. CO2 also reduces the water needs of plants, reducing the risks associated with droughts

The video above, “CO2, The Gas of Life,” features a lecture given at the Summit Old Guard Meeting in New Jersey, October 3, 2023, by William Happer, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of physics at Princeton University and former scientific adviser to the Bush and Trump administrations.

The topic: carbon dioxide (CO2), commonly mischaracterized as a harmful waste product of respiration and a pollutant that is disrupting the planetary climate. As explained by Happer in this lecture, CO2 is actually an essential gas necessary for life. Moreover, its impact on Earth’s temperatures is negligible, and will remain negligible even if the current concentration in the atmosphere were to double.

CO2 Is Not a Pollutant

At present, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at a few thousand feet of elevation is around 430 parts per million (ppm). Closer to the ground, concentrations vary widely, both by location and time of day. This is because ground-level readings are impacted by photosynthesis and the respiration of insects and the like.

In the room where Happer was giving his lecture, the CO2 reading was 1,800 ppm — the result of having a large group of people breathing in a closed space. Air conditioning systems have CO2 meters that turn on fans to bring outdoor air inside when levels get too high.

The question of what is too high is an important one, considering The Great Resetters are pushing a green agenda that demands the dismantling of energy infrastructure and farming in the name of stopping climate change, which quite obviously threatens our quality of life and food supply. Ultimately, it may threaten human existence altogether.

The fact of the matter is that CO2 is not the “bad guy” it’s made out to be, and the “net zero” agenda is wholly inappropriate if maintaining life on Earth is part of the equation.

“CO2 is a very essential and natural part of life,” Happer says. “It is the gas of life. We’re made of carbon after all, mostly carbon, and we breathe out a lot of CO2 a day just by living. Each of us breathes out about 2 pounds of CO2 a day. Multiply that by 8 billion people and 365 days a year, and just [by] living, people are a non-negligible part of the CO2 budget of the Earth.

Nevertheless, we are living through a crusade against so-called pollutant CO2. People talk about carbon pollution. [But] every one of us is polluting Earth by breathing, [so] if you want to stop polluting ... apparently God wants us to commit suicide ...

We're doing all sorts of crazy things because of this alleged pollutant ... more and more beautiful meadows are being covered with black solar panels. It doesn't work very well; it doesn't work at all at night. It doesn't work on cloudy days. It doesn't work terribly well in the middle of the winter because of the angle of the sun.

But nevertheless we're doing it. We’re being misled into climate hysteria, and if you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it. It was published first in 1841, called ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.’ It’s as relevant today as it was then ...

I'm a physicist. I'm proud to say that no one could call me a climate scientist, but I know a lot about climate and I was a coauthor of one of the first books on the effects of carbon dioxide 41 years ago. This was a study done by the Jason Group which I was a member of. I was chairman for a while and it had really good people there.”

Long-Term Impact of Increasing Atmospheric CO2

The key question when it comes to global warming is, how much do you warm the Earth if you double the atmospheric CO2 concentration? This is called the climate sensitivity question. The GUESS is that doubling CO2 would result in a 3-degree centigrade rise in the global temperature.

“It was not based on any hard calculations,” Happer says. “It was because of group-think. That's what everybody else thought, and so that's what we thought. Now, in my defense, one of the reasons I didn't pay much attention to this [is because] I was working on something at this time that I thought was much more important. So, let me tell you about that, so you get a feeling for why I think I'm qualified to pontificate about this subject.

It was the beginning of the Strategic Defense Initiative, of Star Wars ... President Reagan ... wanted some way to defend the United States so that we didn't have to have this mass suicide pact, and among other things we considered using high-powered lasers to burn up incoming missiles ...

But here's the problem. If you take the 1 megawatt laser on the ground and you send it toward the missile, by the time it gets to the missile, the beam — instead of focusing all the power on the missile — breaks up into hundreds of sub beams — speckles — and this was something that was well-known to astronomers. You have the same problem when you're looking at distant stars and galaxies.

Astronomers knew how to fix this ... If you can measure how much this wave is bent, then you can bounce it off a mirror bent in the opposite direction, and when the wave bounces up it's absolutely flat. That's called adaptive optics and it works beautifully. Then, when you focus the corrected beam, you get a single spot instead of hundreds of [beams].

The trouble with that is that if you look at the night sky, there are only four or five stars that are bright enough to have enough photons to do the measurement of the distortion of the wave. So, we had a classified meeting in the summer of 1982. There were a number of Air Force officers there who explained the problem. By chance, I knew how to solve it.

You can make an artificial star anywhere in the sky by shining a laser tuned to the sodium frequency onto the layer of sodium above our heads, at 90 to 100 kilometers.”

While the Air Force was initially dubious about there being a sodium layer in the atmosphere, they did eventually build the sodium laser proposed by Happer, and if you go to any ground-based telescope today, you'll usually see one or two of them. Anyway, that story was simply to impress you with the fact that Happer knows what he’s talking about when it comes to atmospheric constituents and their related phenomena.

CO2 Has No Discernible Impact on Earth Temperatures

According to the climate alarmists, rising CO2 will result in global warming that will threaten all life on earth. In actuality, however, CO2 “is a very puny tool to do anything to the climate,” Happer says.

Keep in mind that there’s no single temperature on the Earth. It varies by location and altitude. For every kilometer of altitude, you have an average cooling of 6.6 degrees C. This is known as the lapse rate. That cooling continues up to the troposphere, where it stops.

The cooling is due to the fact that warm air rises and cool air descends. “It’s the convection that sets that rapid drop of temperatures — 6-and-a-half degrees per kilometer,” Happer says. He then explains the following graph, which details the thermal radiation to space from the Earth, assuming a surface temperature of 15.5 degrees C. The greenhouse gases is the area beneath the jagged black curve.

According to Happer, this is only 70% of what it would be without greenhouse gases, which is shown as the smooth blue curve, because as the sun heats the earth, greenhouse gases — mostly water vapor — impede cooling.

The most important part of this graph is the red jagged line, shown here with a red arrow pointing to it. That red line shows the effect that a doubling (a 100% increase) of CO2 would have on the surface temperature of Earth. As you can see, it’s negligible. It decreases radiation into space by just 1.1%.

As noted by Happer:

“Let that sink in. We’re far from doubling [CO2] today. It'll take a long time, [and] it only causes a 1% change. So, CO2 is a very poor greenhouse gas. It's not an efficient greenhouse gas.”

If you remove ALL CO2, you end up with the green jagged curve. As you can see, the green and black jagged lines run parallel with the exception of one spot. There’s a huge effect if you go from zero CO2 to 400 ppm (green arrow). But it’s again negligible when you go from 400 ppm to 800 ppm (black arrow). As explained by Happer:

“You get all of the effect in the first little bit of added CO2 ... So, it's really true that doubling CO2 only causes a 1% decrease of radiation. The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] gets the same answer so this is not really controversial, although they will never show you the curve or tell you that it's 1%. That would interfere with the narrative ...

So, this is radiation to space. How do you change that into a temperature? They're worried that we'll get intolerable warming of the surface of the Earth where we live, or other parts of the atmosphere.

Here again it's important to do the first order calculation ... and it says that the warming from doubling CO2 is ... less than one degree ... 0.7 [degree] C. Very small. You really can’t feel that.”

Why, Then, the Alarm Over Rising CO2?

Needless to say, this is a huge problem for the climate science community, because a 0.7 degree C difference means there’s no climate emergency, and no matter what we do to reduce CO2 emissions, it’s not going to impact the climate.

So, to fabricate an emergency where there really is none, the IPCC “assumes enormous positive feedbacks,” Happer says. Because CO2 is not a potent greenhouse gas, the tiny direct warming caused by it is amplified by factors of anywhere from four to six to make it seem like it has a discernible impact.

“I like to say it's affirmative action for CO2,” Happer says. “It’s not very good at warming but if you assume lots of feedback, you can keep the money coming in.” The problem with that is that most who have a background in physical chemistry and physics know that most natural feedbacks are negative, not positive.

“The 0.7 degree C of warming you get when you double the CO2 is probably an overestimate, because there are probably negative feedbacks operating in this very complicated climate system that we live in.” ~ William Happer, Ph.D.

This is known as the Chatelier Principle, named after the French chemist who first discovered that “when a simple system in thermodynamic equilibrium is subjected to a change in concentration, temperature, volume or pressure ... the system changes to a new equilibrium and ... the change partly counteracts the applied change.”

So, the 0.7 degree C of warming you get when you double the CO2 is “probably an overestimate,” Happer says, “because there are probably negative feedbacks operating in this very complicated climate system that we live in. The atmosphere, the oceans, everything is nonlinear.”

The key take-home from all this is that whether we’re at 400 ppm of CO2 or 800 ppm doesn’t matter when it comes to impacting the temperature of the earth. In short, the climate hysteria is just that. It’s not based on any real threat. Only if we were able to get to absolute zero CO2 would there be a change, but doing so also means we’d exterminate all living things on the planet. It’s nothing short of a suicide agenda.

More CO2 Will Green the Planet

As explained by Happer, more CO2 will green the planet, making it more hospitable to plant life. The more CO2 there is, the better plants and trees grow, so if we want lush forests and bountiful harvests, cutting CO2 is the last thing we’d want to do.

“All plants grow better with more CO2 [in the air],” he says. “Plants are really starved [of] CO2 today. We know plants need many essential nutrients. They need nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium; most important of all they need water. But they also need CO2, and like many of the other nutrients, CO2 today is in short supply.”

CO2 benefits plants by reducing their water needs, hence less risk from drought. Higher CO2 levels also reduce harmful photorespiration. According to Happer, C3-type plants lose about 25% of their photosynthesis potential due to increased photorespiration. For more in-depth information about the role of CO2 in plant growth and photosynthesis, please view the video. This discussion begins around the 40-minute mark.

Lies, Ignorance, Stupidity or Something Else?

In closing, Happer makes an effort to explain what’s driving the climate hysteria:

“In spite of incontrovertible arguments that there is no climate emergency — CO2 is good for the Earth — the campaign to banish CO2, ‘net zero,’ has been very successful. So, how can that be? I’m really out of my depth here because now I'm talking about human nature. I'm really good with instruments and with solving differential equations but I'm not very good at understanding human beings.

But here are some of the drivers: noble lies, political lies, ignorance, stupidity, greed. Noble lies goes back to Plato who discusses it in ‘The Republic.’ ‘In politics, a noble lie is a myth or untruth, often, but not invariably of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda.’

And here there's a clear agenda. If you could somehow unite mankind to fight some external threat, for example CO2 pollution, then we won't fight each other. There won't be wars. So, I think many sincere people have latched on to the CO2 narrative partly for that reason. You can actually read about it in the early writings of the Club of Rome.

Then there are political lies. This is one my favorite H.L. Menken quotes: ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’”

Ignorance, of course, is widespread, and largely based on incomplete knowledge or a flawed understanding of the facts. And what of stupidity? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the few German clergymen who opposed Hitler and eventually paid for his public dissent with his life, once wrote about human stupidity:

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protest nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.

So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one.”

Happer himself has experienced the danger of opposing stupidity. “I regularly get phone calls threatening me, my wife and children with death,” he says. “So, what kind of movement is this?” Lastly, greed. A.S. Pushkin once said, “If there should happen to be a trough, there will be pigs.” And climate science is currently where the big bucks are — provided your work furthers the global warming narrative and the need for net zero emissions.

Whatever the drivers are, responsible people everywhere need to push back against the false climate change narrative and the net zero agenda, as it will accomplish nothing in terms of normalizing temperatures, but will rapidly erode quality of life and the sustainability of food production, and shift wealth into the hands of the few.

[sources-across]

What is a static caravan?

A towable static caravan park Suffolk is a vehicle, other than the one you drive, that is attached to it via a trailer. Unlike motorhomes in which the house moves with the vehicle.

What is a static caravan?

On the contrary, there are people who have static caravan used, in which they stay temporarily, but do not move it. He has it, let's say, planted, on a piece of land and uses it as a house sporadically without traveling.

Therefore, it is static, but it has your things inside, you sleep in it from time to time, the windows of it would be windows of a house and perhaps you don't want a branch to fall while it is stopped... You already know where come on. You have to secure it.

What does or can insurance cover for static caravans?

To be covered against various situations, we suggest some of them so that we can help you create your ideal caravan insurance.

Fire:

You must protect yourself from fires that may arise or be caused by third parties and may affect the caravan. For example, if a fire breaks out on a nearby farm and ends up spreading, it could affect our mobile home, without it having originated within it.

Freaks of nature:

Sometimes rain, snow, or heavy hail can cause damage to our caravan. For example, damaging the roof, damaging a window or causing something to hit our vehicle. And then? So, nothing, if you have insurance, they take care of everything.

Electrical phenomena:

Suppose we have the static caravan for sale with pitch and we connect an appliance to the socket, and suddenly, something smells bad. A spark jumps. Something burns or fails. It can be a scare from a short circuit or a disaster.

Glass breakage:

Imagine that an old tree branch snapped and hit the glass of your mobile home. It doesn't just hit it, it breaks. If you have good insurance, it is repaired and a new one is placed, and that's it. Zero drama.

Water:

Water can sometimes generate humidity, wear, leaks and leaks. We suggest that you take this into account when contracting insurance with a professional.

After more than 20 years of experience as a leading static caravan dealer, the insurance sector, at statichomesales.co.uk, we can say that no two policies are the same, because no two clients are the same, who use their motorhome exactly the same. For this reason, we will tell you a general approach and we invite you to contact us so that we can make you a budget for custom-made towable motorhomes.

[muskokafarm]

Muskoka Farm Pre Training

A state-of-the-art horse spelling and training facility, Muskoka Farm is a favourite of leading trainers. Surrounded by the Hawkesbury River, it has an impressive 2000m track and 200 stables.

The 280 acre farm is surrounded by national parks and natural bushland, proving to be the ideal environment to tailor care to race horses' physiology. It's constantly refining and updating this approach, fine tuning science and instinct to keep the farm at the forefront of racing facilities. To know more about Pre Training, visit the Muskoka Farm website or call (02)45663106.

Located on the Hawkesbury River in Gunderman, Ontario, Muskoka Farm is one of the world’s most prestigious pre training facilities. This 120-hectare property has been in operation for more than half a century.

Bob Lapointe first bought the land in 1969 and has since built it into a multi-faceted business that includes horse racing. He has been able to churn out numerous Group 1 winners from his stables, including November Rain and Emancipation, and more recent stars such as Dance Hero, Sebring and Happy Zero.

After a number of years in business, Bob and his wife Wendy have decided to move on from their beloved property. A new partnership will take over the running of Muskoka Farm and provide high quality pre training and spelling services to local and international clients for many years to come.

Designed to nurture and condition your horse in the best possible way, Muskoka Farm pre training delivers the goods. A team of dedicated and experienced professionals are on hand to ensure your horse is in top shape to take on the big race.

The 113 hectare facility is well-equipped for breaking, pre-training, spelling and agistment in addition to being an AQIS quarantine centre that readies horses for export to Hong Kong. It also features a 2000m track, a high-tech treadmill and other high-tech amenities to name a few.

The company has been around for more than a century and has an enviable reputation in delivering the highest quality products and services. To find out more about the property or to register your interest, contact Inglis Managing Director Mark Webster today. The company will be happy to answer any questions you may have. The aforementioned video has been complied by Inglis Rural Property to give you a taste of what's in store for you and your horse at Muskoka Farm.

Located on the Hawkesbury River in Gunderman, Muskoka Farm pre training is one of the world's most prestigious pre-training facilities. This 280-acre property is set amongst national parks and natural bushland.

This environment enables us to tailor our care to the physiology of race horses, fine tuning and constantly refining our approach. We are committed to ensuring that our horses are kept in the most suitable, efficient and humane environment for the best possible outcome.

It is our job to formulate a ration that is customised to the requirements of each individual horse. Whether it is a lodged racehorse, pregnant mare, lactating mare, foal requiring creep feed, weanling, yearling preparing for sale, rehabilitating horse, retired or geriatric animal, our nutritionists work closely with their veterinarians to ensure that every animal receives the very best diet and care.

Located on the banks of the Hawkesbury River in Wisemans Ferry, this is one of the most prestigious horse racing training facilities in Australia. It boasts some of the best equine facilities on the continent, with a whopping five stable barns and a horde of ancillary properties including a two-bedroom guest house, facility manager’s residence and helipad. It also comes with a hefty price tag, but if your budget is big enough it’s an excellent place to boogie. To know more about Pre Training, visit the Muskoka Farm website or call (02)45663106.

Aside from the aforementioned gizmo, the property boasts the largest indoor track in the state of New South Wales, an impressive 2.4-kilometre-long crusher dust track and a jaw dropping 800-metre straight. Considering the plethora of horses on the property, it’s no wonder the place is deemed a rite of passage for some of Sydney’s most illustrious bloodlines. The list of winners goes on, and it’s no secret that the farm is a major drawcard for the discerning racehorse owner and his or her guests, as well as the occasional tourist.

[rootslosangeles]

Shop at Our Los Angeles Dispensary for High-Quality Products!

Everyone knows how hard it can be to find high-quality products at a Los Angeles dispensary. Most dispensaries carry a wide range of products, strains, and brands. With so many options, it can be difficult to figure out what the best options are. Luckily, we have the inside scoop at Roots LA! Here’s everything you need to know for the next time you stop by or order online.

What Makes a Cannabis Product High-Quality? You’re probably curious about what makes a cannabis product high-quality, right? Is it the packaging, the price tag, or the potency?

What makes a cannabis product premium isn’t the packaging or price tag. Depending on the product, the cultivation method, the growing conditions, ingredients, and potency determine the quality.

For instance, a cannabis edible that uses all-natural ingredients and zero preservatives or additives will typically be of higher quality than other brands.

But we don’t expect you to parse through all of the available cannabis brands, strains, and products. Instead, we cover some of the top recommendations to give you a head start.

Try Pacific Stone for Affordable Strains If you’re looking for affordable and consistent marijuana flowers, check out Pacific Stone the next time you visit our dispensary. Pacific Stone is a longstanding member of the cannabis industry and has won several awards over the years.

They provide customers with farm-direct cannabis that’s consistent in quality, potency, and price. Check out strains like 805 Glue Hybrid the next time you visit Roots LA.

Go With STIIIZY or PlugPlay for Carts If you’re a fan of wax cartridges, you should consider industry staples like STIIIZY and PlugPlay. Both of these brands are fantastic choices for cannabis carts. Each brand creates potent, flavorful, and high-quality cartridges at affordable prices.

Ask one of our budtenders about the brand they recommend and their favorite strain the next time you visit us in person.

Try Wyld if You Like Edibles If you’re in the market for premium cannabis edibles, purchase a package of THC gummies from Wyld. This brand produces some of the highest-quality cannabis edibles available. With all-natural fruit ingredients, premium cannabis extracts, and minor cannabinoids, you’re sure to taste the quality.

Check out unique flavors like  Marionberry and Huckleberry for a unique twist on the classic cannabis gummy. Regardless of the flavor, you’re sure to find a Wyld product that suits your tastes, needs, and budget.

Get Daily Discounts and Deals at Roots LA! We offer a wide variety of daily deals and discounts besides just the ‘Deals’ tab on our online menu. We have a deal for you whether you’re a recreational, medicinal, veteran, disabled, or senior customer! Here are some deals to expect the next time you visit our weed shop:

20% off your first order on all products 15% from 6 AM to 10 AM every day 15% from 2 PM to 6 PM every day 5% off for veterans, seniors, and disabled visitors

Shop at Our Los Angeles Dispensary Today! Look no further than Roots LA If you’re searching for the best dispensary menus in your area. We offer a wide variety of brands, strains, and products for you to choose from. You’ll find incredible products with options like Kush Mints, Area 41, and more. If you get stuck with all the choices or need a gentle push in the right direction, our budtenders are here to help.

Our knowledgeable staff of budtenders is here to guide you through the process and ensure you find the best product for your needs and tastes. So what’re you waiting for? Come visit us in person at 11045 Sherman Way Sun Valley, CA 91352 or call us at (818) 210-0095!

[popculturebuffet]

Goof Week: Sports Goofy in SoccerMania: GoofTales Woo-oo! (Paid For for WeirdKev27)

Gorsh all you happy people and welcome back to Goof Week, my Weeklong Celebration of everyone’s favorite goofus. 

And today we have a special treat, something nice and obscure but something that still has a vital place in Disney History. Welcome folks to Sports Goof in Soccermania!  

So yesterday in my Goof Troop review I wished there had been another DuckTales episode with Goofy, you know maybe find out what happened to Peg, see Max and Roxanne again that sort of thing.  Whelp SOMEONE must’ve hid a Monkey’s Paw around here somewhere because I got this special instead on comision. This is a VERY intresting little artifact as it came out only 4 months before DuckTales, was produced around the same time, and was written by Tad Stones, who would both go on to work on DuckTales and even more importantly create Darkwing Duck. 

Not only that but it has some odd things attached to it: it’s the first major production starting Scrooge, as he had an educational short about him, the first animated appearance of the Beagle Boys and most important the FIRST time Russi Taylor would voice Huey, Dewey and Louie, something she’d do till her passing a few years ago. At the time of this article she has not been recast, though I personally vote for Cristina Valenzuela, who took over the role of Young Donald and frankly does such a good job with that voice I didn’t know if Russi had already recorded lines for Season 3 before her passing. 

So what IS Sports Goofy in Soccermania you ask? It was a TV Special from 1987, again four months before DuckTales, that was later sold on VHS. My guess is Disney intended for this to become a regular thing like the Charlie Brown or Garfield specials, but my honest guess is with DuckTales MASSIVE success they wanted to put all the TV Animation resources into making more shows to go with it. The fact the special is essentailly a Scrooge story with Goofy in it and Scrooge and the Boys were now tied up in DuckTales probably helped the decision. So we only got one of these and i’m proud to share it for Goof Week. So join me under the cut to see what a Sports Goof is, what Scrooge sounds like without Alan Young or David Tennant andto see me refrence the film UHF because I likes it. 

 So we open with the titles which are neat and then open at the Money bin, we even get a great sign gag that looks like something Carl Barks would write.

So Scrooge greets his nephews the way he greets everybody.. with a canon to the face... though he backs of firing once he realizes it’s them. The boys ALL wear red this special so .. I guess Huey won and now rules all three bodies with an iron fist? So the Huey Hive Mind asks Scrooge for a donation, a standard Scrooge setup, ask the rich asshole for money, as their trying to help the local soccer program and they need a buck fiddy for a trophy. 

Scrooge’s voice here.. is terrible. I do not like to bash voice actors, they are hard working talented people who do a lot of great stuff, often for less pay than they deserve, and this blog ALWAYS makes that painfully clear. And Will Ryan is not without talent: While he hasn’t done much i’m familiar with he did play Petrie in Land Before Time and was great in it. So while I don’t dislike him as a person.. he did an utterly DREADFUL Scrooge. He dosen’t really attempt to do a scottish accent despite the character still saying cannae at one point, and as for what accent he is going for...

His Scrooge just sounds like someone trying to do a “foreign” accent and failing. It just sounds weird and makes every bit of his dialouge aside from one a chore to sit through. And the dialouge isn’t bad dialouge, it’s a well written and animated Scrooge even with the lower budget than Ducktales, but the voice just ruins it for me. Even without Young and Tennant to compare it to this just blows and the fact it’s paired up with the iconic Russi Taylor voice for the triplets.

This being Scrooge he instead fishes a Trophy out of the bin that’s all banged up and dinky and shoos them out. So in natural Barksian fashion the trophy turns out to be worth a million dollars. So we get some reaction shots.. INCLUDING GRANDMA DUCK!

For DuckTales fans joining us who have ZERO idea who that is, since she sadly did not make it into the reboot and Frank did have ideas, Grandma Duck is Donald, Della and Gladstone’s grandma. She’s a sweet old country woman who lives on a farm and is in fact the one who sold him Kilmotor HIll, with her husband renaming it from Killmule hill. I like her a lot since she reminds me of my own grandma and like her she still works when she can. Donald’s cousin Gus loafs around and eats as her farmhand. As you can tell I like her a lot, agani because she reminds me of one of my grandmas so this was nice even if she was only around for 20 seconds of screentime. 

This ends up in the paper and sends Scrooge through the roof, literally when he finds out. 

Two notes  before we move on: The bin has a unique really cool design , though I get why other productions haven’t used it: besides this one’s obscurity while cool it just looks a bit TOO nice for Scrooge. Even in 2017 while still damn cool looking it still looks practicle. This .. is not that.

This looks like MC Hammer built this. It still looks awesome bu tit’s just not Scrooge sadly. 

The other is that his Butler is named Jeeves here, but looks almost exactly like Duckworth. Just feels weird is all. 

Naturally the Beagle Boys happen upon the paper too and their leader, no name given has a plan: Enter legitmately and win the cup all legal like, which dosen’t sound like it lives up to the beagle code of no hones twork.... until he brings up theri going ot cheat their asses off. 

Meanwhile Scrooge tries bribing the boys with a giant trophy at their house... with Donald oddly absent despite Anselmo having taken over for Nash by this point. I know he was still a bit rough at the roll, but come on. It’s just.. weird especailly for reasons i’ll get into soon. 

So Scrooge agrees to sponsor the boys teams so he can get the trophy back square, and is forced to buy a knew ball and here we FINALLY get Goofy. I say finally because this special is 20 mintues long and it takes almost a fourth of it for him to arrive. It’s just weird for him to not be in it for so long. I mean I don’t want THIS

Flashbeagle didn’t take a fourth of the special to get to Flashbeagle. It did take longer than that to get to the title track but when your sitting on THIS

You gotta use it JUST right. Goofy here is not played by Bill Farmer, which IS odd as he did start playing him that year, but my guess is they weren’t sure if they were going with Farmer or the actor who played him in this special, Tony Pope, so they were trying out both as whoever DID get the role would have it for life. Disney takes the casting of the sensational 7 VERY seriously, as evidenced by the fact most cast changes are caused by death and unlike with Tony and Donald it’s clear Colvig hadn’t picked a succesor. I can also see why it’s a hard choice: while farmer IS excellent and was the right man for the job, Pope is still excellent in the role, bringing the warmth and energy you’d expect from Goofy and having excellent comedic timing that’s vital to getting the dog man right. I can see why this was such a hard choice, even if I also see they went with Farmer: Farmer just has slightly more energy to the roll. It’s a small diffrence and something that dosen’t effect the special, but it is a KEY diffrence and the reason Bill’s THE goofy to me even over his original voice actor Pinto Colvig. 

Also I may of mispoke there... see it’s not Goofy in this special it’s SPORTS Goofy. No really every bit of dialogue refers to him as Sports Goofy. It’d be like if they refered to then CEO Micheal Eisner as Won’t Think Through Eurodisneyland Micheal Eisner. 

So Sports Goofy helps them get a ball in an honestly awesome way and shows despite his clumsy manner, he’s damn cordinated, easily putting everything up and showing some real skill with the ball. So Moneygrubbing Scrooge decides Sports Goofy is his ticket to get the trophy back and recuits goofy as coach and star player for the boys team. 

So Asshole Scrooge meets his team the Greenbacks.. which are a bunch of random animal characters with no real personality. They are a hippo, a goat, expresso the ostrich, a navy (blue) seal,  an elephant in a beanie, a killaroo and a cheetah or leopard. But I have one question, really simple really easy one...

You need 11 players for a soccer team, thank you google. So they DID get that accurate. With Goofy and the Triplets you only need 7 more. THIS is why Donald’s absence is glaring: he’s just oddly not there when they needed 7 other characters but Elephant in a Beanie gets in there. And it’s not hard ot fill either: Donald , Daisy (Because duh), Gyro and Grandma Duck (Because both cameoed but I only mentioned Grandma Duck, though this is ALSO Gyro’s first apperance), Gladstone (who as it turns out had a cameo storyboarded that didn’t make it into the final product), Gus (Since grandma duck) and Scrooge’s butler since he was in an earlier scene anyway so why waste the character model. They could still play the same roll as easily steamrolled underdogs and it’d make more sense.  It just baffles me that with such a deep bench to play from, they don’t use ANY OF IT in favor of the cast of Animal Soccer World.

The Greenbacks can’t play for greenjack, which worries Scrooge.. but Goofy is able to carry them to the finals, while the Beagle Boys make their way there too. We find this out.. via newspaper transition. We get a bunch of headlines telling us what happened instead of you know a montage because that costs money and they already spent 1.50 making this special.. they only have 50 cents left. 

So the Beagles recognizing Sport Goofy is the only thing in their way plots a kidnappin. We get a gut busting scene of the beagles all hiding in Sports Goofy’s house with him being oblvious only to spring on him. 

The next day with Sports Goofy a no show the team is bummed, even mor ewhen they find a kidnapping note from Don’tGetNotToLeaveEvidence Beagle Boys. Seriously give that to the officals. 

So Asshole Scrooge tries to give a rousing speech... and it is a sight to behold and the one highlight of pope as scrooge... it’s why I picked it as the article image. That glitching isn’t me by the way: it REALLY does that. Coupled with the yellow eyes i’ts just fantastic. So the team decides to morosely play the game and Hivemind Huey boos scrooge for not having faith in him. Instead of again you know telling the officials. Maybe assimilating the other made Huey dumber. I

So the game begins and the Cheating Beagles cream the Give Up To Easily Green Backs, while Sports Goofy watches from the other Crime Beagles hideout. It honestly reminds me of UHF: a dumb well meaning guy whose vital to something succeding is kidnapped.. it dosen’t involve Weird Al dressing up as rambo but still. It also makes me want UHF but with the disney cast. Fethry as weird al, Donald as his best friend, Fethry’s girlfriend for the comcis as weird al’s girlfriend, Gyro as philo, Goofy as Stanley, and Pete of course is Stacey Keach. I could go on but you get the point. Someone draw this.  Sport Goofy is a clever bastard and escapes by working one of his shoes off, taking a nearbye knife and cutting himself free.. and almost stabbing a beagle boy in the face but that would just make two. Sport Goofy escapes and the lunkheaded beagle boys chase after him IN THEIR CAR WHILE GOOFY RUNS AHEAD OF IT.  Goofy, he can really move! Goofy, he’s got attitude! Goofy HE’S THE FASTEST THING ALLIIIIVEEEEEE. Sport Goofy makes it in time fo rhalf time, rallies the troops and it goes how you’d expect: They overcome the beagles blatant cheating, win the cup, the beagles attempt to cheat with a rigged ball backfires and they all get arrested. It’s by the numbers stuff. We end with Scrooge deciding to dontate the trophy instead (though in a great bit asking if it was tax deductible), and posing for a team shot> We get some awesome credits music and we’re out

Final Thoughts:

This special is mediocre: There are only a handful of great jokes, it’s your standard “teamwork makes the dreamwork plot” that dosen’t work because our underdogs really CAN’T play without their star, and Scrooge’s voice hurts to listen to. Pope and Taylor are great and while Will Ryan is an awful Scrooge, he is a good Beagle Boy or five. 

It IS worth a watch though. It’s riffable enough with the sometimes sloppy unfinished animatoin in the last part and Scrooge’s terrible voice, and it is still is a neat oddity for 90′s kids like myself to not only see Russi’s first thing as Huey Dewey and Louie, but to also see Scrooge and Goofy with vastly diffrent voice actors, as well as Gyro and the Beagle Boys first animated apperances. The fact this came just months before Ducktales makes it all the more intresting. So if your looking for a legit good Disney product.. this is shoddy at best if well meaning. But as a bit of disney history, especially only clocking in at 20 minutes so it’ sa brisk watch, it’s worth a look if your into that. 

Next On Goof Week: We come on in To The House of Mouse where goofy becomes faster than a speeding punchline,  more powerful than pete when his family has to wrestle him to the ground to take him to the doctor and able to make tall leaps of logic in a single bound. it’s SUPER GOOF!

So thank you for reading and if you liked this review give it a like and consider joining my patreon at patreon.com/popculturebuffet. As a patron you’d get access to exclusive reviews, the patreon’s discord and to pick a short each time I do one of these shortstaculars. Donald’s comnig next month and the deadline is in only a few days to join up for said month so the clock is ticking. Even a dollar a month helps me reach my stretch goals so please i fyou can sign up today and if not, I understand and i’ll see you at the next rainbow

[thesirmourretreat]

Nahan is a quaint little hill station situated in Himachal Pradesh. Settled amidst the Shivalik mountain range, there are some great places to visit in Nahan for tourists. The town is known for its expansive gardens and stunning temples. There are a variety of hotels and resorts in Nahan, ranging from budget to luxury. Situated in Sirmaur district, the town celebrates many festivals and fairs that turn this pictur

esque town into a colourful spot. 

The climate in Nahan

Since it is not located very high up in the mountains, this town experiences a pleasant weather all throughout the year. The summers are nice and cosy while the winters see chilly conditions. The summer extends from April to June, where the temperatures can soar as high as 38 degrees, however, the cool mountain breeze offsets any effects of the heat. From July till the end of September, this town experiences the maximum rainfall. The winter lasts from October to February. The winter is generally pleasant, but due to cold winds blowing across the town, the temperatures can also cross sub-zero at times. 

Best time to visit

Nahan is a good place to visit both in winters as well as summers. However, to enjoy the picturesque town that is nestled in the Himalayas, September to November is the best time. It is right after the rainy season so it is lush green and it is right before winter, thus not too chillly. The temperature remains cool and pleasant. There is a slight rainfall in the month of October, but it only adds to the experience of visiting this town. Jamta Nahan is one of the best places to take in the nature in and around the town. 

What are favourite attractions?

The town is rich in cultural as well as historical heritage. There are many great places to visit in Nahan, which has quite a few tourist attractions including temples and parks. If you like to be one with the nature, then there are great trekking options. You can also take a walk by the potato or ginger farms or amongst the peach plantations. For someone with interest in history and architecture can visit Triklokpur Temple, Shudh Dhar Shiv Mandir or Jagannath Temple. The underground sewage system is a marvel in this town as it helps keep it tidy despite seeing many tourists all around the year. 

How to reach Nahan?

Nahan is well connected by a network of road and railways. It is nearly 260 kilometres from the New Delhi, 85 kilometres from Chandigarh, 90 Kilometres from Dehradun and roughly 140 kilometres from Shimla. The best and the easiest way to reach is by road. You can drive up there yourself or you can take an overnight bus. The nearest railway stations are in Chandigarh, Kalka and Yamunanagar. People visiting from places like Mumbai (1641 kms away), Kolkata (1715 kms away), Bengaluru (2387 kms away) or Chennai (2421 kms away) can either take a flight to Delhi and travel by cab or bus or they can fly down to Chandigarh, Dehradun and Shimla. All three airports are under 150 kilometres away. 

Places to stay

With the current world situation where many people continue to work from home, Nahan offers some great places to for long stays as well as short trips. There are enough options available for hostels as well as luxury resorts. It is also a great places if you wish to go for a weekend retreat with your team or plan a getaway with your entire family. One of the best hotels in Nahan is The Sirmour Retreat. The resort offers same great packages for your entire team as well as packages for your workstation holidays. The hotel has a lively bar, some mouth-watering food and great entertainment options with an in-house movie theatre as well as a pool table.

[plugincaro]

Man Living in a 10'x10' Tiny House & grows own food

Man Living in a 10’x10′ Tiny House & grows own food

[dana-woodhams]

Sabine Letman lecture

Industrialisation

Before the industrial revolution garments were sewn by hand and were one off bespoke pieces. Then the steam engine was developed factory based machinery was created, therefore multiple garments of the same style were made, this in turn made clothing more affordable. In the 19th century mail order fashion became popular; this meant that garments were able to reach a broader audience. Because of the industrial revolution we now have fast fashion today.

Resource use

More and more of earth’s natural resources are being uses, more than the earth can regenerate. Some of these finite resources are used to produce garments.

‘Each year the point at which we already used what our annual 'budget’ covers takes place earlier this day is called EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY’  every year this day gets less and less.

Climate change

Production of polyester uses finite resources oil and gas, most fast fashion brands solely use polyester, making them damaging to the environment.

During the production oil spills happen, methane emissions are released, as well as water/air pollution. This impacts human health especially the surrounding locals or extraction sites, it also disrupts wildlife and causes loss of biodiversity.

Biodiversity loss

Monoculture is the farming process in which the same crop is grown on the same plot of land year after year. Many cotton farmers do this, because of the high demand for cotton the farming process has become very environmentally harmful (farming in places cotton doesn’t usually grow). Farming in the wrong places for a plant causes the soil to dry out which increases the need for irrigation, it also means that farmers have to use more pesticides. This then contributed to biodiversity loss.

Worn and dumped

Around 75% of our wardrobe goes to landfill after use (sometimes without being worn). Collectively around the world every second one lorry gets discarded. Only 1% of clothing thrown out is recycled.

The liquid dying process for new trends is very damaging to places like Bangladesh as toxic chemicals are released into the rivers, polluting the wildlife and water. This is a serious health hazard.

Human Exploitation

In the fashion industry sweatshops are a big thing in the process of garment making. In 2013 the Rana Plaza building factory collapsed killing and injuring thousands. Unethical working conditions are on the rise as the demand for cheap clothing increases, big corporations  increase profits making employees work for less and less in such disgusting conditions. Working for below minimum wage, working with toxic substances without protection and child labour are among the multiple things workers go through, working for these fashion brands.

Making change happen/ solutions

The more people that get out of bad buying habits and changing old mind-sets, the quicker the industry can change for the better. Movements like Greenpeace and the extinction rebellion are actively changing mind-sets.

Responsible sourcing- using recycled materials is a good way to avoid the need to use new materials. Not all of the materials have to come from the fashion industry. For example recycled materials can come from the fishing industry (nets).

Responsible design- zero waste design uses the whole fabric length with no waste. The garments have aesthetically pleasing shapes and fits, all while creating no waste.

Responsible production- producing digital prototypes instead of physically creating a prototype reduces waste, decreases costs and actually speeds up production and communication between companies.

Responsible sales- to combat waste, some fashion brands, like Filippak, have a lease system for their garments.

Responsible consumption- by extending the use of a garment, resources are being save, it also prevents it from going to landfill. To help consumers, designers should make garments attractive so customers can value and keep them for a long time.

Responsible waste management- by using leftover fabric scraps it means cutting back on wastage but also financial loss. Many new designs can come from fabric-leftovers.

In order to avoid wastage as a whole the linear model or a garments life should be closed into a circle, this is known as circular economy.

The three main goals of circular economy are; design out waste/pollution, keep products and material in use and regenerate natural systems. Closing the gap and returning products into their raw material state means that the process can start again. This also mean that less resources are being uses which means less waste and a healthy economy.

In conclusion sustainable fashion is very important if we want to protect he earth and its resources. Like stated above, these issues are serious and need our attention, when there are lives on the line the problem must be solved. Everything has a knock on effect to the other, for example when the dyes to make out clothing are disposed of the get released into fresh water, this in turn pollutes the surrounding habitat and aquatic life, we then catch those fish to eat. To help stop this, we all should stop buying new clothes and should try to buy second hand or do a clothing swap with a friend or family member.

[fortnegrita]

28 times black people were effortlessly environmentalists

i got inspired by all the posts wishing me a happy black history month, that i had to jump in and big up the numerous ways that black folks stunt in the world of sustainability. and no, this isn’t a list filled with facts about 28 eco-leaders in the black community, that’s a whole other post that needs to be published.

this is 28 things commonly known in the black community that we take for granted, but are very much so actions of environmentalism. and it’s more than 28 ways, i could go on for millions of years, like my ancestors, but we’re sticking to 28 because, well, you know why. 

1. black people reuse old containers. whether is that tin can that had shortbread cookies in it one christmas, or butter tubs, or that crisco can full of grease. instead of purchasing tupperware made from virgin materials, we cut back on manufacturing and go the ‘feed two birds with one hand’ route. if i buy this butter tub, i will have butter now, and a food container later. genius!

2. emancipated ourselves through slave revolts and the underground railroad. yup, our most warrior moves in our modern history, was also an anti capitalist move. this is huge! capitalism, and the consumerism by product, is the biggest contributors to climate change; it exploits natural resources like metals found in your phone and coal used to light factories. our demand for things whether it’s cotton to make a pair of trousers in the 1700s or a new cellphone in 2018;  it’s all increasing unused carbon in the air.by resisting, we slowed down demand. also, since agriculture is a leading contributor to climate change because of pesticides by abandoning the agriculture fields, where sugar and cotton both strip the soil of it’s nutrients, we gave the land a major rest.

3. our mommas told us to ‘turn off the damn lights.’ yes, she was trying to save her coins, and why not?! the energy system is monopolized anyways, why spend money with a company you are forced to be in a relationship with. two, cutting down on electricity is cutting doing on fossil fuels (coal or gas) extracted from the earth. this is important because carbon is energy, and energy is never gained or loss, it simply goes some where else. so keeping your momma’s kitchen light on when you not in there, means more coal with be extracted from earth, burnt to put energy into a grid and then sent to your momma’s house via a power line. once the energy it burnt it is exhausted into the air. so instead of that energy being in in the ground it’s now in the atmosphere, making the air warmer, making places that aren’t typically hot like the Arctic, melting archaic ice, rising sea levels, and in the future possibly pushing you and your momma out of your house because of horrible flood damage, and now your property is considered a floodplain.

4. multiple families living in a single home. my family like many black families and even families of color have lived with multiple people outside of their nuclear family in the house. most of my childhood, some extended family lived in my parents’ house. my aunt and her kids, my uncle, godmother, granddad. how is a crowded house an environmental plus? homes take up lots of energy, imagine all those people forgetting to turn off your mommas lights. :-D trying to keep homes warm or cold require an insurmountable amount of energy, the more people in one house means less energy usage, also more body heat. and don’t front like your favorite memories weren’t created in a house full of people.

5. our elders tell us ‘no ins and outs.’ again, an issue of energy usage, when children run in and out of the house they ar eletting air (or heat) out of the house making our controlled climate sysmtem to work harder to keep our home at a certain temperature.

6. when yall packed snacks for outings. moms probably made an amazing tuna salad for the beach. you may have missed out on boardwalk fries and pizza slices, but look at the upside, oyu avoided so much packaging all those years.

7. when the matrons kept a few good plants. whether it’s hanging from a macrame-styled planter or in her garden, greenery is always good for the air. also photosynthesis is a sink in the carbon cycle, meaning is absorbs carbon helping to decrease carbon in the atmosphere.

8. when families sit on the porch. a seemingly idle activity, but it is a huge element of community activism. how else are neighbors suppose to talk about their kids asthma, the rotting smells of landfills, or getting more fresh foods into their neighborhood? on the porch is where conversations are sparked that could lead to policy change, closing landfills, or even, the drafting of something as powerful as the ‘principles of environmental justice”. also, healthy communities = healthy planet.

9. when that plastic grocery bag has 237 lives. conditioner cap, fried chicken batter bag, lunch box, bathroom trashcan liner. it’s in our DNA to be resourceful, why buy cheap single use showers caps when you can use a plastic bag before you turn it into a trash bag?

10. seeing the potential in a 98% empty toothpaste tube. there’s no such things as waste, and there’s still toothpaste in that tube. my trick? pinch the head of your tooth brush directly into the tube cap.

11. our enslaved ancestors made a meal out of pig intestines. being from a 5% household, i’ve never been into pork, but i find beauty in my ancestors’ ingenuity to turn literal shit into sugar. this is zero waste at best. globally family of the diaspora have used every part of their preferred animal. the ancient tribes of the americas who use every part of the buffalo, my carribean yardies who can cook a mean goat and save the leftover for mannish water. zero waste takes a lot of creativity, to avoid the trash can, the most convenient, yet unfortunate option.  

12. when you sick, take a nap. medical care, one of the largest expenditures for the american budget. lot’s of infrastructure, products and people banking on your sickness so they can ‘cure’ you. chances are high that you can sleep off whatever is wrong with you, before you need to go to see a physician.

13. the montgomery bus boycotts. for 381 days, black commuters in montgomery, opted-out of the bus system. Considering the amount of fuel it takes to get a city to work for 381 days, black commuters help to cut fossil fuel usage and decrease particulates and carbon released into the air from the bus’ tail pipes.

14. when we take public transit. yes, contrary to #13, but public transit i still an alternative transportation option to cars. the us has the third largest vehicle per capita at 795 people out of every 1,000 people. cars reliance contributes to climate change with exhaust of particulates making the atmosphere warmer, water runoff (subsequent flooding) from asphalt (impervious) roads, maintenance and upgrades, all demanding more manufacturing, more carbon usage.  

15.  since we still don’t have complete road infrastructure in our countries. this is tricky, because people praise roads for their ability to offer accessibility to jobs, but it also means an increase of development, gentrification, removal of indigenous folks from land they’ve stewarded for centuries, more trash flying in to sacred places, etc…. the best way i can say this is there’s no jobs on a dead planet.

16. crafted the principles of environmental justice. in 1991 we, with our brown and yellow brothers, crafted the principles of environmental justice, during the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, shout out to Ms. Dana Alston. the list of principles is the coldest thing i’ve ever seen written on behalf of the planet. my favorite principles?  

#4 Environmental Justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food.

#9 Environmental Justice protects the right of victims of environmental injustice to receive full compensation and reparations for damages as well as quality health care.

#8 Environmental Justice affirms the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment. It also affirms the right of those who work at home to be free from environmental hazards.

17. black americans stayed in the south. post reconstruction era, for those of us that took the road less traveled. we stayed in the south and maintained a connection to the land. we stewarded the land, keeping rural farms in black ownership for over 100 years while also expanded their resourcefulness (see #21 remedies) as black southerners were intentionally isolated from resources (racism). shout out to fannie lou hamer.

18. moved up north. contrary to staying in the south, folks moved up north during the great migration for ‘opportunities.’ sure, there was a lot of industrial jobs, but what’s bigger than that is the minimized lifestyle. thanks to red lining, black people were racially discriminated against and only able to live in ghettos, confined to centralized areas in the uban core, making walking to work or public transit more accessible (see #14), living quarters were smaller so know need to heat an empty house ( see #4), condensed purchasing because a lack of homes square footage and funds (see #)

19. hand me downs. yall got a shirt that made it through a whole line of cousins? yea, me too. we are in a time where american hands me downs are stifling clothing markets in african countries, so getting your big cousins bedazzled jeans aint so bad. and my soap box, never buy brand new baby clothes, like fah what!?!!

20. you got mcdonald’s money. easily one of the corporations that hate black people and the planet the most. and even though that corporation hates both black people and the earth, it exploits both. micky d’s takes our money, bombards our neighborhoods, feeds us crap and makes us look like clowns in marketing campaigns. all while contributing to obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes cases, so no, we ain’t got no mcdonald’s money.

21. home remedies and traditional african medicine. before capitalism saw an enterprise in the health of people, our ancestors were developing cures and ailments with plants found in nature;; tonics, elixirs, poultices, YOU NAME IT!  some modern day remedies include; red clay and vinegar for bee stings, chickweed tea if you’re sick, mint for digestion, rubbing your skin with eucalyptus to keep mosquitoes away. onions on the bottom of your feverous feet and #12 above. a few of my favorites.

22. marooning. from north african moors to the somalian gypsies on caravans through the dessert, to the isrealites in exile from egypt to nanny in the jamaican mountains to the escaped slaves on the coasts of ecuador and columbia to the geechee folks on the gullah islands to MOVE in Philly; we are the the original off-the-griders. going into maroon communities (like many communities built after revolts and ‘making it’ north) we relied heavily on the earth for livelyhood including food and shelter, it reconnected us with the land in a very intentional way. we ain’t new to this we true to this. we’ve always been nomads, when a place doesn’t provide us with our most basic needs, we dip. this is eco-friendly for several reasons. 1. we understand the importance of living of the land, and because of that we are better stewards of the earth. 2. in maroon cases we didn’t have the infrastructure like running water, so we may have depended on natural catchment systems, 3. we likely composted food and human waste to create our own safe and sanitary waste systems.

23. black farmers. as much as we predominately run from the idea of farming, there are many black families that continue our legacy of farming. our legacy of farming didn’t start in the slave trade. matter of fact, some of us were kidnapped to american because we could grow a particular crop, like rice (which the us affectionately calls ‘carolina gold’). farmers are the most concerned citizens about the state of the planet. climate change and the human impact on agriculture could mean a food scarcity and lost of jobs. there is a growing number of young farmers filling in the intergenerational gaps between them and the elder farmers, so that we don’t loose these skills. we are grateful.

24. being financially poor. there is a positive feedback between the increase in climate change and the increase in global affluence. and that is because as more people have more disposable income, they buy more dispensable things. for instance, shoes in every color instead of one pair of functional shoes for work. with countries like India and Chile’s growing middle class, we are over-consuming for what the planet can handle. not that it’s glamorous but being poor means that you are contributing less to climate change. in fact, the countries most vulnerable to climate change make up 70% of the world’s population, but only 3.2% of the global greenhouse gas emissions.

25. historically being sea explorers, alchemist, astrologists, engineers, masons. our skill sets run deep, and many ofthem are reliant on the earth. mansa musa, the world’s richest man, used a certain sea current to carry him and his 2,000 boats to the americas. also, you remember how we built those massive three triangular monuments, that were built without any construction equipment. that are aligned with the stars and the summer solstice, when the sun reaches it’s highest point in the sky.

26. literally the entire being. essence. and inspiration. that is george washington carver. carver the great, developed techniques to prevent soil depletion caused by cotton farming. one of his most notable techniques was crop rotation a practice used by many farmers (see #23) today. he also created 200 products from the peanut plant and another 100 from the sweet potato. he wrote literature on how to start self-sufficient gardens, uses for wild plants and how to compost. he is the GOAT!

27. reusing grease for frying. every black family got a old pot of grease. if not, check your pockets for your black card. the notorious pot of grease is symbolic to so many things; 1. your family understands that nothing should be single-use, you need a handful of uses out of everything, even cooking grease. 2. your mother knows how to save a good coin. 3. there’s been several crispy dinners cooked at your house. 4. the next fried meal gonna be fiy, because the flavors from the last four fryings have marinated at the bottom of the pan.

28. midwifery. a practice we never lost through time. even, when hospital services became available to black families, some women have always preferred a midwife to deliver their babies. in this way, black midwives are helping to usher more life onto the planet; creation being the number one late of nature. their practices tend to be holistic, and  that cutbacks on epidurals and disposable hospital garbs.

that’s all folks! black people are certified everywhere, you ain’t gotta check our resumes

[livingcorner]

How To Prepare Soil For Vegetable Gardens | The Tiny Life

Having taught people to garden for years, many people want to know how to prepare their soil so they can start a vegetable garden.  If you talk to people who have been growing for years, you’ll notice they spend a lot of time building the soil in their garden beds.

You're reading: How To Prepare Soil For Vegetable Gardens | The Tiny Life

For first time gardeners I always recommend to start small and because each patch of dirt is different, I recommend starting with a raised beds, which is nothing more than building a bed of soil on top of the ground instead of in it.  You can add sides made out of wood, edging or other materials as a side wall, but it isn’t required, mounded dirt works just as well if you’re on a budget.

Building A Raised Bed Frame

For most people they want to have the tidy look of a wooden frame and it can be done quickly for little money.  Start with three 2×6’s and cut one of them in half.  This will form the four sides of the bed and create a bed that is 4 feet wide by 8 feet long.

This is an ideal size because it minimizes the number of cuts (pro tip: big box stores will cut it for free for you) and at four feet, you can reach to the middle from either side without having to stretch too much.  A few screws will make a solid frame for you to fill in the dirt with.

Turn The Soil Below

Even though we are going to build a bed above the ground, we want to break up the soil below it so that our plant’s roots have an easier time of penetrating the ground as they grow.  Ideally you would shovel off the top layer if it is grass, but I’ve done it both ways.  Removing the grass below will help reduce weeds coming up later, so it’s often worth the effort.

If the soil is pretty bare, what I’ll do is rake the top then go buy a gallon jug of white vinegar to douse the little bits of weeds or grass with the vinegar to kill a few days before I build my bed.  White vinegar will work well to kill the weeds in spot treatments, but if you have more than 10% coverage, I’d just scrape the top off completely.

The last part is take a “digging fork” and just break up the top few inches of soil, it can be pretty chunky because we’re going to cover it all with our soil bed mix soon anyway.  Don’t get too tied up in making it perfect, this is a really a rough pass that we do quickly and move on.

Read more: 8 Natural & Homemade Insecticides: Save Your Garden Without Killing the Earth

Garden

Like A Pro

Learn How With Our

Beginner Gardeners Guide

Mixing The Perfect Soil To Grow In

First off, there are many different options here and if you ask 100 people you’ll get 101 recommendations.  So understand that if someone uses something different, that’s fine.  For most people just starting out I try to make it really simple and we can get into more of the nuances later.  So use this mix to start and in a few years, start to try different things.  We want to get you to gardening as quickly as we can and if you get caught up in what mix is the best, you’ll never actually start gardening.

So I use a mix of compost, vermiculite, and peat moss. Typically I buy for a single 4 foot by 8 foot bed that’s around 6 inches deep the following:

10 bags of compost (one cubic foot size bags)

1 bale of compressed peat moss (three cubic feet size)

1 bag of vermiculite (2 cubic foot sized bags).

1 small bag of Bone Meal

1 small bag of Blood Meal

If you don’t know what these are, just print this post off and bring it with you to any big box store, they’ll know exactly what you need from this list.  If the employee doesn’t know these items, it’s best to find someone else because these are gardening 101 supplies.

Compost

For compost you’ll find a lot of different options, my favorite is “mushroom compost” which you can find bags at any big box hardware store.  A close second is “Black Kow” compost.  I’ll often grab a few of each to make up my 10 bags for my bed.

If you can’t find these specific ones, it really isn’t a big deal, use whatever compost you can find at your local store or garden center.  Compost provides a lot of nutrients to your plants and serves as the base for seeds to root into.

Vermiculite

Vermiculite is essentially rock dust crushed up, it provides a lot of minerals for your plants, but it’s main function is to act like a sponge for water.  Be sure not to get confused with perlite, it’s not the same.  This one might take some calling around to find, if there is a local gardening group they might have some good leads.

I will also add a note here that if you start searching around about vermiculite, you’ll inevitably run into an old timer that will make the point about asbestos in vermiculite.  This is something that we had to worry about 40 years ago, but today there is no source allowed in the USA or Canada that doesn’t carefully screen and test for this.  The myth still persists today, but you should have zero concerns because the industry has long made changes to prevent this.

Often garden centers or seed/farm supply places carry it.  I’ve even seen it in small bags at your big box hardware stores.  If you can’t find it consider purchasing a few bags off of Amazon, while it’s a bit more expensive locally, you can buy a few of these bags of vermiculite and be good for a 4×8 bed.

Read more: What Is Dolomite Used for With Plants?

Peat Moss

The last part of the soil mix.  This fluffs up the soil, allows for good oxygen infiltration and also acts like a sponge to hold in moisture until plants need it.  This can be found anywhere and they type or brand doesn’t matter.  The only thing I’ll suggest is make sure you get it from the soils section where you’d find your bags of compost or near the bags of mulch section.  Sometimes they sell small bags that are meant for growing orchids, these are often expensive, but the ones in the bagged compost section is usually sold “compressed” for very cheap ($10-$20 for 3 cubic feet compressed).

A common question that comes up around peat moss are concerns about if peat moss is sustainable.  It is true that 10 years ago peat moss was harvested from natural wet lands, but today it is done in a manner that is regenerative.  If you are still concerned, consider sourcing coconut coir which is a material similar to peat moss but made from the waste product of coconut husks.  In the end, I suggest you don’t get too caught up in your first year or so, just get your first year under your belt and then work on improving in later years.

Bone And Blood Meal

I prefer to use bone meal and blood meal, but there are many options.  Obviously from their names, they are a animal sourced product.  Those wanting a non-animal source can try seaweed meal or fertilize, you can buy seaweed fertilizer here.  Bone and blood meal are organic sources of the major nutrient (NPK: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium).

Since we are starting out with such good ingredients, we don’t need much of these.  If we were starting with the soil in ground, there may be need for more as directed from a soil test, but since we are building our own soil we don’t need a soil test for our first year or two.  I start out with one large handful of each, mixed evenly across the whole 4×8 raised bed.

Mixing It All Together

Some people will use a tarp to mix the soil together, I just skip that and dump everything in a pile in the framed bed, then mix with my hands or a shovel.  If you choose compost that is moist, but not sopping wet it will mix easier.  Sometimes this means pulling off the top few bags at the garden supply place so you get to a lower layer of bags that haven’t soaked up any recent rain.

Here is my basic approach:

Take your peat moss bale and place it in the bed

With a shovel stab the plastic in a line to break open the bale

Turn it over to dump the peat on the ground and remove the plastic

Shake out half your vermiculite on top of the peat moss, set the rest aside

Grab one large handful each of bone meal and blood meal, sprinkle across the bed

Place a bag of compost in the bed, stab with shovel to dump on the pile

Repeat with compost about half your bags

Using the shovel and hands, mix it all up until it’s well mixed

Add remaining materials and mix it all up

smooth out the top and give the soil a brief water

How To Water Your Garden

You want to water it a few days before you plant if you can, this will let all the water to absorb into the peat moss and vermiculite.  Water for a count of five and then stop.  Again, counting to five, if the water fully absorbs into the soil so there is no sheen on the dirt from the water, water again for a count of five. repeat counting to five until the water doesn’t absorb all the way in five seconds.  This is a good indicator that the soil is nicely saturated with moisture, but not soaking.

In the end building your soil will set you up for success for years to come.  Following this formula and starting small, you will have a better drastically easier time because we’re not trying to fix our existing soil or battle weeds.  Start with one 4×8 bed, then next year go a little bigger.  The number one thing I see is new gardeners burning out their first year because they took on too big of a garden.

Your Turn!

What are your garden plans this year?

What tips have you learned?

By Ryan Mitchell on April 24, 2020   /   Gardening, Homesteading  

Source: https://livingcorner.com.au Category: Garden

source https://livingcorner.com.au/how-to-prepare-soil-for-vegetable-gardens-the-tiny-life/

[architectnews]

Off Grid House, Megalong Valley NSW

Off Grid House, Megalong Valley, NSW Sustainable Residence, Australian Home, Architecture Images

Off Grid House, Megalong Valley

15 Jul 2021

Design: Anderson Architecture

Location: Megalong Valley, NSW, Australia

Off Grid House

Nestled in Sydney’s dense Blue Mountains bushland, Off Grid House acts as a premium benchmark for sustainable living under extreme conditions while coexisting with nature. The modest, highly durable home is net zero emissions and BAL-FZ rated; self-sufficient in power, water and sewage.

The distinctive architectural form is a contemporary twist on the typical elongated passive-designed dwelling, unifying two skillion roofs of opposing slopes to optimise solar energy generation for electricity as well as passive heating and cooling for thermal comfort, bolstered by high levels of insulation and air tightness, an HRV, external shading and double glazing.

Trees cleared to adhere to bushfire safety requirements are reused within the home, showcased most noticeably through joinery. This environmentally and ecologically considerate design celebrates Australia’s great outdoors, providing an oasis connected to nature as well as a safe haven when protection is required; testament to sensitive, innovative and sustainable architectural practices.

What was the brief? The brief was to design a bushfire resilient, net zero emissions home, with minimal carbon emissions produced during construction. With no access to services and treetop views across the valley, the 3.2-hectare block was a prime site upon which to create an off-grid home.

What were the key challenges? The primary challenge – and appeal – of the project was the remote location engulfed by dense bushland. The site was deemed BAL-FZ (Flame Zone), which is the highest rating of bushfire risk in Australia, and with lacking access to services, safety and technology were crucial. Additionally, paramount to Anderson Architecture’s practice is providing sustainable architecture, from procurement through to post occupancy. As such, the main challenges were linked to balancing the design objectives with the stringent building codes to ensure a low cost, bushfire-resistant home, which retained as much of the surrounding bushland as possible.

What were the solutions? The result was the creation of a modest yet highly durable home, designed to withstand extreme conditions and the test of time. Off Grid House was constructed with minimal embodied energy and continues to require zero operational carbon emissions. Inspired by the local sandstone caves, the home fosters a connection with nature and also closes up when outside conditions are unfavourable, offering prospect and refuge. Being perched on a ridge, Off Grid House boasts views across the valley, extended through the deck wrapping around the southern wing.

The site was a primary driver determining the construction methods and material palette for Off Grid House. A concrete shell was utilised to provide the home’s fireproof skeleton, with a low carbon magnesium oxide cladding providing a flameproof skin, embracing the insulation between. As an additional fire-proofing measure, the verandah roof affords a dual purpose, folding down to be used as a flame zone bushfire screen as required. The trees which required removal to meet safety regulations were recycled and reused on site within the internal structure and joinery, displaying a variety of textures, colours and maturity.

Off Grid House is completely self-sufficient. Rainwater collected from roofing serves all the home’s needs and a worm farm wastewater treatment system manages sewerage. Large double-glazed windows and doors frame vignettes of the landscape, while assisting the optimisation of the thermal capabilities offered by the concrete flooring. The low carbon emissions produced during construction were offset with carbon credits.

What started as somewhat of an experiment has encouraged a brilliant learning curve to occur within the practice, as Anderson Architecture now specialises in designing sustainable homes in extreme conditions as well as in the inner city.

Off Grid House in Megalong Valley, NSW – Building Information

Design: Anderson Architecture

Project size: 94 sqm Site size: 32000 sqm Project Budget: $750000 Completion date: 2020 Building levels: 1

Photography: Simon Anderson and Nick Bowers

Off Grid House, Megalong Valley, Australia images / information received 150721

Location: Megalong Valley, New South Wales, Australia

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[biogenericpublishers]

The Role of Technological Advancement in Improving Food Security in Africa: A Review by Desalegn Teshale Wolde* in Open Access Journal of Biogeneric Science and Research

Abstract

Technological advancement has brought significant improvement in achieving food security in many parts of the world. This paper tries to review agricultural technology advancement on improving food security in African countries. Different literatures regarding to agricultural technologies which contributed to food security were reviewed. Public investments in scientific research across countries brought significant impact on the food security of its citizens. Notably Green Revolution had brought dramatic production increase mainly in Asian and Latin American countries. Despite its positive influence in Asian countries, African were not well benefited from technological advancement. Hence, little efforts were made in West Africa countries on NERICA rice varieties and in Uganda Mosaic virus resistant cassava varieties were taken as an example. Most recently many African governments showed their commitment to support the agricultural sector so as to boost the production and thereby achieve food security. According to the literatures reviewed diverse agro ecology’s and farming system, rain fed dependent agricultural system, poor infrastructural development, limited knowledge and skills required by the technology were considered as the bottlenecks for achieving food security in Africa. Strengthen the capacity of research and scientific institutions to develop, generate and disseminate the technology could play crucial role in achieving food security. Besides strengthen technology adoption and extension services for smallholder farmers will have significant importance. Equally importantly access and provision of input and output markets, rural infrastructural development, credit access, development of irrigation canals and other issues shall be important policy directions that supports food security. Finally, creating regional or international integration enables countries to exchange, share and adopt technologies that ultimately increase production.

Keywords: Food security, agriculture, Technology, Africa.

Introduction

The world’s population is expected to be more than 9.7 billion in the coming thirty years, with nearly all of the growth occurring in the developing parts of the world particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asian countries. This population boom will be accompanied by increased strains on the food supply and resources, causing increased pressure on political and ecological systems, as well as threats to global security. These regions are experienced with poor agricultural production and productivity where it cannot feed the growing population.

For the last fifty years, scientific and technological advancement have benefited farmers by driving agricultural production in many parts of the world. Agricultural technologies have the potential to increase food availability through boosting crop productivity, increasing the supply and volume of food production per unit of agricultural land, sustaining the overall local and domestic food production [1]. Hence, generating appropriate agricultural technologies is among the most revolutionary and impact full areas of modern technology driven by increasing demand for food and feeding an ever-growing population. Improved technologies in agricultural sector can substantially increase the agricultural production and sustainability. Agricultural technologies refer to the improved management practices, improved and high yielding crop varieties, different agricultural machines and tools designed for improving in the agricultural production system [2]. Moreover, agricultural technology includes use of inorganic fertilizer, use of chemical like pesticides/insecticides, tilling the soil, irrigating land, cultivating crop, harvesting and threshing technologies, livestock feeding, etc.

Increasing food production with the help of land, water, local seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides will not achieve the intended yield necessary to feed the increasing population. Hence, widespread use of local and advanced technologies and practices are critical to increase agricultural production and productivity [3]. Put differently, achieving the galloping food demand Via population growth by the conventional agricultural production might not work anymore which calls attention for agricultural technology advancement. However, access, availability and use of improved technologies into the hands of farming community is hardly possible. Swaminathan (2011) pointed that technological inaccessibility or unaffordability for the poor farmers has an impact on the efficiency of agricultural production. Due to this many smallholder farmers in developing countries particularly in Africa are not yet food secure. This paper tried to review the roles of technological advancement on achieving food security in Africa.

Review Methodology

This review paper focused on technological advancement on the food security issue in Africa. Hence, different available literatures on existing agricultural technologies were reviewed.

Result and Discussion

In this section different literatures regarding to technological advancement on food security, policy approaches and different issues were discussed. Besides, the existing opportunities and challenges were also discussed.

Policy Approach on Technology Advancement

Different literatures’ show that by combining different agricultural technologies like zero tillage, conventional breeding, genetic modification, integrated soil fertility management, irrigation technology and different agronomic practices can boost the existing agricultural production. Hundreds of existing agricultural technologies and practices have the potential to boost agricultural yields in the developing world [4]. Technological innovations and improved farming practices are therefore helpful to increase agricultural production and productivity. Accordingly, African governments shall give due emphasis on the advancement of technologies mainly on drought tolerant seed varieties, drip irrigation, recommended usage and application of fertilizers, agrochemicals, agronomic practices like integrated pest management, conservation farming, and improved watershed and soil management.

African agriculture is characterized by low technology use and adoption coupled with different socioeconomic and institutional limitations for the sector. Despite the existence of agricultural research, science and training institutions in Africa, the capacity to generate, renovate and release agricultural technology is limited [5]. This might be the limited capacity of researchers due to educational system of the respective countries coupled with the limited allocation of public budget spent on research and development. Besides, poor infrastructural development, oversized and fragmented land use system, and outdated farming tools and or equipment were also contributing for low production in Africa. If agricultural technological development is not progressing, African agricultural production continues to experience low or stagnant productivity that leads to increasing food deficit and rising poverty and hunger.

A widely accepted objective for agricultural development in Africa is to achieve sustainable intensification with the adoption of new technologies such as improved high yielding seeds, inorganic fertilizer, irrigation technologies and natural resource management. These technologies improve land and labor productivity there by increasing yield. However, different reinforcing problems that is common in many African economies do not yet achieve food security. To mention some of the problems are poor infrastructures, poor human health, lack of well-developed monetary system, weak coverage of veterinary services, and thin agricultural markets. As a consequence, it has pressing challenges on the productivity of smallholder farmers [6]. The technology uptake of smallholder farmers, therefore, highly contribute to achieve food security. Hence, use of appropriate technologies can improve productivity and high volume of production both at household consumption and for increased household income [7].

Current literatures on the impacts of the technology adoption on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries is quite limited. It usually lacks properly exploring the multiple aspects which characterize food insecurity. Many authors tried to derive conclusions on household food security indirectly by measuring, instead, the impact on household welfare [8], through monetary (income and expenditure) or production measures (farm production and yields). It showed that the effect of agricultural technologies would have significant impact to achieve food security.

The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) is Africa’s policy framework for agricultural transformation, wealth creation, food security and nutrition, economic growth and prosperity for all. "Agriculture is everyone’s business: national independence depends on its development because it enables us to escape the scourge of food insecurity that undermines our sovereignty and fosters sedition; it is a driver of growth whose leverage is now acknowledged by economists and politicians; it is the sector offering the greatest potential for poverty and inequality reduction, as it provides sources of productivity from which the most disadvantaged people working in the sector should benefit." Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, Chief Executive Officer of the NEPAD.

Another policy approach as pointed by Johanson and William (2007) is “Agricultural education and training has been demonstrated to be a vital, but much neglected, component of agricultural development in Africa. It is under-valued, under - resourced and under-provided. Human capital in agriculture has been depleted by long neglect.” Hence, what would be necessary to improve agricultural productivity and food security in Africa is strengthening agricultural educational systems, more specifically the coverage and quality of higher education and research institutes. FAO [9] indicated that agricultural growth contributes not only to achieve to food security but also greatly supports poverty reduction. This might be many developing countries are agriculture dependent economy of which the sector is the main livelihood of citizens. Therefore, sustained and continues agricultural growth is very crucial for African countries.

Technological Advancement Policy Issues Related to Food Security

Globally accepted definition of food security is a situation where “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a productive and healthy life” [10]. In otherworld food security refers to the minimum level and availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food, and assured ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.

Many African countries have adopted food security policy as one of their main national plans. This can be achieved through greater public investment in agriculture technology generation and innovation. Using the agricultural technologies, agricultural production and productivity would increase dramatically. Besides, technologies help conserving food by substantially reducing postharvest losses and food wastage, giving farmers access to real-time information and services in the field. In general, broader use of available technologies and improved management practices would have the following issues;

Help farmers to produce more grain, which improves their livelihoods and can provide food to the growing population.

Enhance safety and nutritional value of the food

Achieve agricultural sustainability through reduced resource use and climate friendly technologies.

Once we understood the wider use of technologies, different policy instruments are important to address and enhance the technology. Following this, many African governments have given due emphasis on technology generation, development and adoption, input subsidy including credit, rural infrastructural development particularly irrigation, market access both for the input and output, access to land and other resources.

Opportunities and Constraints of Technological Advancement

In many parts of the world particularly South and East Asia countries agricultural productivity has been growing rapidly, due to extensive use of new agricultural technologies. For millions of poor people, particularly in Asia, the technological advances of the Green Revolution (complemented by a massive increase in irrigation, chemical fertilizer and high yielding varieties) greatly supported for the reduction of poverty. As farm production increases, farm household’s income and wages would be higher which leads to lowering the price of food, and hence generating new livelihood opportunities as the success in agriculture provided the basis for economic diversification [11]. Rapid technological advancement notably in the last 50 years leading to increased productivity in many parts of the developing world. Green Revolution that most Asian and Latin American countries used it as a vehicle to push out of poverty.

Agricultural technology advancement can reduce the risk of crop failures, safeguarding income of household food consumption and nutrition [12]. Hence, there is a positive link between agricultural technology and food security. Therefore, technologies enhance agricultural productivity gains and lower per unit costs of production, with the effects of raising the incomes of producers and of shifting outward the supply curve, which can lower food prices [13].

New and existing technologies to combat biotic and abiotic stresses, raise crop and livestock productivity, improve soil fertility and water available can potentially increase the amount of food production. Storage, refrigeration, transport and agro-processing innovations can address the different dimension of food accessibility. According to IFAD [14] report average cereal yield in developing countries increased by 2.7% per annum between 1966 and 1982. Particularly the performance in South Asia was quite impressive, where, between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, wheat yields increased by 240% and those of rice by 160% [15]. Even though rice and wheat were impact full crops during Green revolution, gain from new technology have also occurred in other crops and regions with increased investments in agricultural research and extension service.

Development and release of modern varieties have been impressive in many of the developing countries. Byerlee [16] estimated that 74% of rice, 70% of wheat and 57% of maize grown in developing countries were improved or modern varieties. Even though these seeds are outputs of the green revolution with its ingredients (HYV, fertilizer and irrigation), substantial proportion of these improved or modern seeds are grown with low or no inputs [17]. This might be taken as an additional attribute of the modern seeds. According to the reports of the world bank [18], the average cereal yield in the early times of Green Revolution (around 1961) was 1 ton per hectare in the developing world (around 1961) and the productivity rose to 3 tons per hectare in 2000. Regionally, East Asia and the Pacific increased to 4.5 tons per hectare, Middle East and North Africa increased to around 2.3 tons per hectare, while sub-Sahara countries are stagnated around 1 ton per hectare.

In 2000, the area under improved cereal varieties coverage was 84 % in East Asia and Pacific, 61% in Middle East and North Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, while in Sub-Sahara countries the area covered by improved cereal crops were only 22%. In 2002, fertilizer consumption had reached 190 kg per ha of arable and permanent crop land in East Asia and Pacific, 73 kg in Middle East and North Africa, but Sub-Saharan countries fertilizer consumption was less than13 kg.Here fertilizer is taken as one of the agricultural technologies that can boost productivity. Given available technologies at a hand, the farmers ability or level of technology adoption is limited.

Around 1961, average cereal yields were around 1 ton per ha in the developing world, and rose to nearly 3 tons per ha by 2005. They increased to around 4.5 tons in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), to around 2.3 tons in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), while they stagnated around 1 ton in SSA [18]. Even though a number of technologies can play a significant role in addressing food security, African countries mainly sub-Saharan region has yet food insecure. This region has many challenges of productivity than any other region of the world; more diversified agroecology, and more crop and livestock pests and diseases than elsewhere. There are no dominant farming systems that extend over very large areas such as irrigated rice and wheat in Asia. Irrigation infrastructure is poorly developed. Climate change will significantly add to the technology challenge. As a consequence of these factors, Africa is less able to borrow technology from other tropical countries; and technology transfers between regions in Africa are also constrained. Unlike Asian, African green revolution was partly on non-cereal crops like mosaic virus resistant cassava varieties released in Uganda [19].

Recently many African countries showed their commitment to boost the agricultural productivity with due emphasis on investment of science and technology. Through plant breeding techniques producing high yielding and disease, pest and drought tolerant crop varieties. These techniques can be hybridization, molecular-marker assisted selection, agricultural biotechnology, crop protection solutions and other technologies that enhance the quality and quantity of the yield. Increasing yield reduced hunger, it further leads more income, then less poverty. On the contrary technology advancement may not necessarily help poor farmers in real terms. If a country is nationally food secure, this might not necessarily mean all citizens at the household level are food secured.

The ingredients of green revolution in India were successful to increase the yield at the national level. These ingredients are affordable to those who are relatively rich farmers. Shiva (1993) as cited by Kathryn Sebby (2010) the Green Revolution favored for the rich who are endowed with best farm areas; hence they can afford expensive technological investments for. High yielding crop varieties are dependent on expensive inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and it also requires knowledge and skills associated with use of these technologies. This large volume of fertilization and chemical use leads to serious environmental issues like salinization problem. Further they forced to sell their land and other assets to afford the technology of the Green Revolution [20]. This clearly showed poor small farmers were far away from the benefits of the Green Revolution and even worse off.

Rashid [21] summarized the futurities of Green Revolution in India; high initial outlay, since most of poor farmers were tenant farmers they have little or no money to buy seeds, fertilizer, fuel, machinery, inappropriate irrigation schemes that cause the environment, unemployment getting higher because of mechanization which leads to other social crisis, caused regional disparities as Green Revolution purposively implemented where water supply, large fertilizer access and farm credit were assured. As consequence India’s first Green revolution which was launched to ensure food security as there was severe food shortage by focusing mass production, was ended by the above-mentioned failures. Hence the country left behind achieving food security at household level.

Even though technological advancement has been registered achievement, hunger and poverty continue to be common phenomenon in the developing world. The problem is particularly acute in areas of the world dependent upon rain-fed agriculture, in particular sub-Saharan Africa, where the impact of new technologies has been less apparent and agricultural productivity has at best stagnated, and may even have fallen in some areas [22]. Widespread use of advanced technologies and practices is critical to intensifying food production in an environmentally sustainable manner, but the situation for food-insecure smallholder farmers is exceptionally risky, making them averse to experimentation [3]. Technology adoption is inhibited due to social, economic and political situation of a given many sub-Saharan countries. Hence, technologies exist, at least some, diffusing it for the poor farmers to enhance the productivity is a critical challenge [23-25].

Recommendation and Conclusion

As world population is increasing achieving food security is key issue in the 21st century. Modernizing the agricultural sector is prime objective, as the sector is main satay in many food insecure countries where population growth exceeds their economic growth. Therefore, food security without continuous and innovative technology development would have been unimaginable. African governments should create enabling policy environment on most promising research and technology innovations that further improve farm productivity. Understanding the technology and its complexity of adoption strategy must be given due attention. Since full range of scientific research both social and natural sciences are key to solve food insecurity challenges, African countries should invest on research and development [26-28]. Removing barriers that prevent technological advancement and adoption of the technology for the poor farmers is crucial, equally importantly secure input and output markets, rural infrastructural development, providing credit, constructing irrigation canals and other issues shall be policy directions that significantly supports food security. Creating regional or international coordination enables countries to exchange and adopt technologies among them [29].

Agricultural technology advancement in Africa not only boost agricultural productivity but also supports its profitability, sustainability and hence ensure food security as well as obtaining the full range of nutrients [30]. Therefore, to make these technologies impact full support policies have to be developed for effective technology transfer and extension programs that ultimately focus on smallholder farmers’ productivity.

More information regarding this Article visit: OAJBGSR

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[sagarbiswas]

#MAR #MAKAUT #lockdownactivities #MandatoryAdditionalRequirements Name of Activity: Review a Movie Name of the Movie: Interstellar

My Review: To infinity and beyond goes “Interstellar,” an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan’s vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done, the director’s ninth feature also proves more emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children (and vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director’s best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, “Interstellar” reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside “The Wizard of Oz,” “2001,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Gravity” in the canon of Hollywood’s visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered.

We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point shortly, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for several radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world’s armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.

“We’re a caretaker generation,” notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA test pilot who hasn’t stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot was first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars,” Cooper muses. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”

And oh, what dirt! As “Interstellar” opens, the world — or at least Cooper’s Steinbeckian corner of it — sits on the cusp of a second Dust Bowl, ravaged by an epidemic of crop blight, a silt-like haze hanging permanently in the air. (Some of this scene-setting is accomplished via pseudo-documentary interviews with the elderly residents of some more distant future reflecting on their hardscrabble childhoods, which Nolan films like the “witness” segments from Warren Beatty’s “Reds.”) And as the crops die, so the Earth’s atmosphere becomes richer in nitrogen and poorer in oxygen, until the time when global starvation will give way to global asphyxiation.

But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it’s gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan’s films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth’s current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand’s ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth’s gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium.”)

Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of “2001,” by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey’s laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepards as Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (another obvious “Interstellar” touchstone).

Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth’s surface — “Interstellar” (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience’s ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn’t glean every last nuance on first viewing. It’s hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth’s ingenious 2004 Sundance winner “Primer” — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)

The mission itself is a relatively intimate affair, comprised of Cooper, Brand’s own scientist daughter (Anne Hathaway), two other researchers (Wes Bentley and the excellent David Gyasi), and a chatty, sarcastic, ex-military security robot called TARS (brilliantly voiced by Bill Irwin in a sly nod to Douglas Rain’s iconic HAL 9000), which looks like a walking easel but proves surprisingly agile when the going gets tough. And from there, “Interstellar” has so many wonderful surprises in store — from casting choices to narrative twists and reversals — that the less said about it the better. (Indeed, if you really don’t want to know anything more, read no further.)

It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of “The Prestige” and “Batman Begins,” or the multi-tiered memory maze of “Inception.” The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like “Space Station” and “Hubble 3D,” suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn’s great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole’s shimmering plasmic vortex.

With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber’s playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet’s surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)

This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades’ worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent “Zero Dark Thirty” mode). It’s a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret, and unbearable grief.

That moment signals a shift in “Interstellar” itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.

On the one hand, the movie marvels at the brave men and women throughout history who have dedicated themselves, often at great peril, to the greater good of mankind. On the other, because Nolan is a psychological realist, he’s acutely aware of the toil such lives may take on those who choose to lead them, and that even “the best of us” (as one character is repeatedly described) might not be immune from cowardice and moral compromise. Some people lie to themselves and to their closest confidants in “Interstellar,” and Nolan understands that everyone has his reasons. Others compensate by making the most selfless of sacrifices. Perhaps the only thing trickier than quantum physics, the movie argues, is the nature of human emotion.

Nolan stages one thrilling set piece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance’s journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet “Interstellar” is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child’s twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.

It’s hardly surprising that “Interstellar” reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film’s lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie’s interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. VFX supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on “Inception”) again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film’s effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), “Interstellar” begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.

[bitcoinminershasrate]

Sparkpool Review: 2021 Registering, Setting Up Farms

China can be called a cryptocurrency superpower. Most of the mining pools are concentrated in the Middle Kingdom. First of all, this concerns the mining of Bitcoin, but also in the Ethereum blockchain 40% of the network capacity is controlled by services from the PRC, not to mention the younger promising platforms. True, this year the country's authorities adopted a number of legislative acts that forced large data centers to leave China. This, to some extent, influenced the depreciation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Perhaps, over time, China will cease to be the center of crypto mining, which is quite natural. If the state itself decided to issue a cryptocurrency, then it does not need competitors. But all Chinese pools are still working and the most powerful in the ETH and BEAM ecosystems is Sparkpool, a resource open to cooperation with miners around the globe. Pool interface and registration Pool interface and registration Official site - https://www.sparkpool.com The design of the main page is quite simple, only two interface languages ​​are supported: Chinese and English. To go to the registration page, click  Login , then Register and the Create an account window will appear on the display . Sparkpool Review - Select the international code for your country. - Enter your phone number - Create and confirm a password. - Solve the captcha. - Click Send to receive a verification code. - Enter the verification code from sms. - Accept the terms of the user agreement and click the orange Register button. Instead of a phone number, you can use email. Upon completion of registration, you need to create a sub-account and connect two-factor authentication. In 2021, you can work at Sparkpool without registration. The service has two modes of operation: anonymous mode and accounts mode. Registration is not required, if you use anonymous mining, coins will be automatically transferred to your wallet when you collect a sufficient amount. The only difference between these two modes is that registered users can hold coins in the balance to automatically receive interest (2.3% per annum). At least that's what the Sparkpool Ethereum Mining Setup Guide says https://sparkpool.kf5.com/hc/kb/article/1413416/?lang=en . True, it is unlikely that any of the miners will leave their coins for a long time in the pool wallet, especially at such a low percentage. To withdraw funds, you need to link both a phone number and an email address, as well as enable 2FA. Sparkpool Review: Main coins available for mining At the time of writing, Sparkpool is mining coins Sparkpool Review Main coins available for mining - Ethereum; - CKB; - BEAM. Sparkpool Grin coin mining no longer supports How to set up hardware on Sparkpool To start mining, you need to set up a batch file of the mining program. Mining ETH on Sparkpool instructions for beginners: In the summer of 2021, mining the Ethereum cryptocurrency brings a high profit on any model of GPUs with a video memory of 6 GB or more. Previously, to mine Ether on RX 570/580 series cards, you had to install a modified BIOS . The eight-gig versions of these cards are still relevant now, but it is not necessary to flash the BIOS. Most popular mining utilities can now change timings on the fly. You just need to compose a batch file correctly, add a special parameter to activate the "straps" and adjust the overclocking parameters in MSI Afterburner or AMD driver settings. Optimum acceleration values for  Rx 570 / 580 - Power Limit +30 - Core Clock 1150 - Memory Clock 2050 Nvidia RTX 30 series graphics adapters have proven themselves well in Ethereum mining. Manufacturers even began to install a software hashrate limiter on the most budget model of this RTX 3060 line. However, the developers of mining software were able to partially solve this problem. The green cards of the 16th series, especially the GTX 1660Super , as well as the AMD RX 5600 / 5700XT video cards, have also proven themselves quite well. The settings for each model are different; they largely depend on the manufacturer of the memory chips. For example, if you have a GTX 1660S video card with Samsung memory, you can overclock the memory up to 1100/1200 , for a micron you need a smaller overclocking, somewhere around +800 . But if Hynix video memory is installed on these cards, then the memory clock parameter, in general, is reduced to a minus, to -1004 . You need to choose the optimal overclocking for each card of your rig yourself, and if that doesn't work out, ask more experienced miners on one of the thematic forums. There are also articles on our site dedicated to different models of video cards. After setting the overclocking, proceed to the software settings - Create an Ethereum wallet. - Download Phoenix Miner or another program that supports Ethereum mining. - Select a server from the list on the Help Center / Introduction of mining ETH page. - Create a bat file An example of a batch file Sparkpool Ethereum for Phoenix Miner: PhoenixMiner.exe -pool eu.sparkpool.com:3333 -wal WALLET ADDRESS Farm name -pass x pause Important!!! Instead of " WALLET ADDRESS ", specify your wallet address, do not forget to put a full stop and add the name of the rig (for example, Rig1), save the file with the bat extension and start mining from the miner folder. To monitor production, enter the wallet number in the " Wallet address " field on the main page. Statistics appear after the miner sends 8-10 valid shares ( share accepted ) to the pool . Sparkpool Review wallet address The Phoenix Miner program is recommended as a universal option for working with any video card, but there are many alternative options. TeamRedMiner and LolMiner are suitable for AMD cards , and for Nvidia T-rex and Nbminer . Ethereum coin is also mined on Innosilicon ASIKs with a built-in memory of 5 GB or more. Lolminer settings for Sparkpool Beam: lolMiner.exe --coin BEAM --pool beam-eu.sparkpool.com:2222 --user WALLET ADRESS pause The Beam coin is more beneficial for AMD GPUs, and the CKB cryptocurrency is mined only on ASICs. Payment of remuneration and commission At all pools of the spark pool, earnings for miners are calculated according to the PPS + system, that is, each accepted share is paid. The pool commission is 1%. In principle, this is not much, but not so little either. Its closest competitor Ethermine takes 1% from the miners, and F2pool, which is one notch below the rating, takes 2% in general. But there is a Hiveon pool with zero commission and the same payout system. At eth.binance pool , miners are paid money every day, regardless of the amount of earnings, and the commission is only 0.5%. Withdraw funds If you mine Ethereum cryptocurrency on Sparkpool, the withdrawal occurs automatically every day at 15:30 (Chinese time). The ETH withdrawal amount is set at 0.1 coins.Important!!! Beam Sparkpool withdrawal starts at 10:00 (UTC + 8) for all miners with one coin on their balance. Submit a withdrawal request and keep the wallet turned on until you receive your money. Sparkpool Review: Conclusion Sparkpool Review Conclusion Sparkpool has consistently ranked second in the Miningpoolstats, second only to Ezermine in terms of power. But, it is more suitable for large data centers and owners of large mining farms , because the amount of 0.1 ETH for a rig with a capacity of 120 MH / s will be mined for about 30 days. Compared to its closest competitors, there is a very weak selection of coins here. When Ether goes to PoS, only two mountain pools will remain on this server, and if Beam drops in price, then GPU miners will leave it. In the meantime, the service is quite popular, although not the way it used to be. However, at the time of this writing, the European ETH sparkpool server is available for connection and statistics are displayed. The PPS payment system, combined with the low pool commission, is beneficial for miners. If the minimum withdrawal size of 0.1 ETH is not a problem for you. Well, for those who want to mine BEAM cryptocurrency, Sparkpool is one of the best options. Set up rigs and successful mining! Read the full article

[orbemnews]

Oil Giants Prepare to Put Carbon Back in the Ground During more than three decades in the oil and gas business, Andy Lane has managed the construction of enormous facilities for extracting and transporting natural gas, in places like Trinidad and Indonesia. Now he is working in his native England, taking on a complex and expensive venture that essentially aims to reverse what he has spent much of his career doing. Mr. Lane’s newest assignment is designed to collect carbon pollution from a group of chemical plants in northeast England and send it to a reservoir deep under the North Sea. The multibillion-dollar project could be a breakthrough for a technology known as carbon capture and storage, a concept that has been around for at least a quarter-century to reduce the climate-damaging emissions from factories. The idea sounds deceptively simple: Divert pollutants before they can escape into the air, and bury them deep in the ground where they can do no harm. But the technology has proved to be hugely expensive, and it has not caught on as rapidly as some advocates hoped. Still, lots of attention is being paid to carbon capture as a way to meet the targets in the 2016 Paris climate agreement. As a candidate, President Biden promoted carbon capture’s promise; last month, Exxon Mobil announced a $3 billion investment in low-carbon efforts, including carbon capture; and a week later, Elon Musk promised to put up $100 million for a contest seeking the best carbon-capture technology. The project in England, in an area called Teesside along the River Tees, is led by the oil giant BP and expects to have size on its side: The area is home to one of the country’s largest clusters of polluting factories and refineries. By linking them together — collecting all their emissions by pipeline, and charging them a fee — BP hopes to achieve sufficient scale to make a profitable business of tackling their pollution. Teesside “has quite a lot of the big industrial emissions sources in the U.K., and that is why this project makes sense,” Mr. Lane said. It is also fast becoming a focal point of attention in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, which is eager to cement support in the onetime Labour stronghold. The area’s turn toward Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party helped it win big in the 2019 national election. On Wednesday, Teesside was designated one of eight “freeports” in England, an economic zone with lower taxes and other business incentives. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the Exchequer, also gave it an extended shout-out in his budget presentation in Parliament that day, citing the carbon capture effort as he called Teesside “the future economy of this country.” Mr. Lane and the area’s influential Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen — described by Mr. Sunak as “an inspiring local leader” — portray carbon capture as the means to rejuvenating run-down industrial regions like Teesside. “It puts the region on the map and attracts additional investment,” Mr. Houchen said. Their plans would certainly turn Teesside into a vast construction site, potentially employing 2,000 workers. BP and its partners propose to build a very large electric power station fueled by natural gas near a shuttered steel mill at the mouth of the river. The plant would help replace Britain’s aging fossil-fuel-burning power stations and provide essential backup electricity when the country’s growing fleet of offshore wind farms are becalmed. Equipment would remove the carbon dioxide from the power station’s exhaust. Pipes would run through the area rounding up more carbon dioxide from a fertilizer plant and a factory that makes hydrogen, which is winning favor as a low-carbon fuel. BP also expects to connect other plants in the area. Pipes would take the carbon dioxide 90 miles out under the North Sea, where it would be pumped below the seabed into porous rocks. Four other oil giants — Royal Dutch Shell, Norway’s Equinor, France’s Total and Italy’s Eni — are also investors in the plan, although the final go-ahead awaits a financial commitment from the British government. The price for the initial stage could approach $5 billion. About two dozen carbon capture projects are operating globally, but the technology has struggled to overcome high costs and worries about liability if the carbon dioxide somehow escaped. Some also see it as a lifeline — albeit an expensive one — for polluters. “Carbon capture is being used as a Trojan horse by the fossil fuels industry to keep demand for fossil fuels alive,” said Mike Childs, head of science, policy and research at Friends of the Earth in Britain. He added that it would be better to create processes that didn’t “create pollution in the first place.” Carbon capture has had its share of false starts in Britain. David Hopkins, managing director for Britain of CF Fertilisers, a major emitter and a likely customer for BP, said he had been discussing versions of the Teesside project “for at least 10 years.” But increasingly ambitious climate change goals help make the case for technologies like carbon capture. While Britain and other countries have made strides reducing emissions from electric power generation, carbon capture will be needed to deal with large-scale polluters like steel, cement and chemical plants, experts say. Many governments and corporations increasingly appreciate that carbon capture “will be needed as part of the portfolio of technologies to reach net zero” for carbon emissions, said Samantha McCulloch, an analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris. She said investment in the technology was accelerating. Oil companies are also under growing pressure to reduce the carbon content of the energy products they sell. They are investing in wind and solar power, which have proved to work, as well as in technologies, like carbon capture, that fit with their expertise and may not pay off until well into the next decade, if ever. What’s distinctive about the Teesside scheme is that it tries to make a virtue of emissions. Mr. Lane and Mr. Houchen, the mayor of the Tees Valley, said it could help preserve 5,500 jobs at chemical plants in the area and attract new investors who want their exhaust fumes cleaned up. Unemployment among Mr. Houchen’s 675,000 constituents is about one-third higher than the British average. Big polluters say the BP plan could keep them in business. They already pay about $45 a ton to emit harmful gases under an emissions trading system, and that amount is expected to increase. Mr. Hopkins of CF Fertilisers, which employs 200 people in Teesside making fertilizer products using hydrogen derived from natural gas, said the facility might eventually put 700,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide into BP’s pipes. If pumped into the atmosphere, that amount would cost more than $30 million a year in carbon taxes at current prices. Hooked up to the carbon capture system, users like CF are expected to pay fees negotiated with the government that would be competitive with or cheaper than the carbon trading tax. Without a carbon capture plan, Mr. Hopkins said, the plant might need to close because of pressure from cheaper, imported fertilizers made producing higher levels of pollutants. Carbon capture “has a massive role to play” in meeting climate goals, said Oswald Clint, an analyst at Bernstein, a market research group. If the major oil companies “can make a business out of it by collecting emissions from industrial players, then even better,” he added. Mr. Lane already has about 45 engineers and others working out the details of Teesside. Louise Duffy, a senior geologist at BP, has spent two years scoping out the realm beneath the North Sea for a safe place to park the emissions. She and her colleagues have settled on a stretch of sandstone about 15 miles long and five miles wide, which could hold as much as 500 million tons of carbon dioxide. BP would begin by injecting about three million tons of carbon dioxide a year, ultimately reaching as much as 20 million tons a year if another proposed carbon capture project, led by Equinor south of Teesside near Hull, is connected. At BP, which is cutting some 10,000 jobs as it slowly exits the fossil fuel business, “it is good to have new areas for geologists to move into,” Ms. Duffy said. The British government is considering underwriting the scheme and others by providing, among other things, a guaranteed price for the electricity from the new power plant. This kind of subsidy, designed to attract investors, helped kick-start the country’s thriving offshore wind-turbine industry. Late last year, Mr. Johnson’s government also said it would seed carbon capture investments with a fund of up to £1 billion. The government has proposed two carbon capture “clusters” like Teesside by the mid-2020s and two more by 2030. All the candidates are northern industrial areas, the region that helped assure the Conservative Party’s victory last election. The investments would bolster Mr. Johnson’s pledge that Britain’s carbon emissions will reach net zero by 2050. The Climate Change Committee, Britain’s environmental watchdog, said in a recent study that carbon capture would be “essential to achieving” that goal at lowest cost. If BP can put together a package including government support that provides sufficient profits for the company, the power plant could begin operating in around five years. Mr. Lane’s goal, he said, is to create a regulatory and technology model that can be used many times, cutting costs like the wind and solar power industries. “These things can be done, and they can be done repeatedly in many parts of the world,” he said. “But you have to start.” Source link Orbem News #Carbon #Giants #ground #oil #Prepare #put