Jennifer Marohasy

Around 70 per cent of Swedish reindeer slaughtered are calves, which means they die without seeing snow, claims the animal welfare group Viva!.  Read more here.

REMEMBER the stories about how the Murray Darling Basin, the food bowl of Australia, was going to be lost to salt?  Headline after media headline told of imminent ruin from rising water tables bring salt.  
The Riverina, a once rich farming area in south western New South Wales, was considered most affected by this “scourge of [...]

HOW many times have you heard it said, the science is settled, we will have catastrophic global warming unless we change our ways and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?  
While the “science might be settled” it does not seem to be well understood.  
At least there has been a dramatic rise in key greenhouse gases in the [...]

Starting with an average grain yield of 3.75 tonnes hectare and a realistic average price of $220 per tonne, a Haystack farm will produce $497,775 from each hectare in a hundred years, which is the life expectancy of a child born today.

This allows for a modest 3% increase p.a. for combined yield advantage and price [...]

 
 
I hope you all had the opportunity to watch Seed Hunter last week, if not the documentary is now able to be downloaded online at: http://seedhunter.com/community.html?showresults=1.    
 
Kind regards,
Nadja  

The European Union (EU) is developing a new ‘Thematic Strategy for Pesticides’ including a proposed new ‘Sustainable Use Directive’.  According to the UK’s Pesticide Safety Directorate the new regulation could outlaw up to 85 percent of pesticides currently used by farmers and render conventional agriculture as it is currently practised unachievable.  Professor Sir Colin Berry, [...]

On 1st Sep 2008 the Queensland Government issued a Mineral Development Licence for coal to the wholly Queensland Government owned Tarong Energy Corporation over the iconic Haystack Road farmlands.
Harvest has begun on the Haystack Plain which has once again been favoured with a bountiful crop.  This may truly be our last harvest on this inherently [...]

THERE has been much written about Australia’s national character emerging from a bush ethos: the idea that a specifically Australian outlook emerged first amongst workers in the Australian outback.  Banjo Paterson, perhaps more than any other writer, created and defined this cultural heritage.  His story about the shearer and his sheep (the jumbuck) remains our most [...]

Tomorrow is the United Nation’s “World Food Day” and the focus is on the pressing need for the world to adapt to climate change. But even before “climate change” became a political concern, the poor have been unable to deal effectively with drought, storms and flooding.
Now government programmes in the name of climate change have [...]

“Australian cities must join a global network in which urban farmers grow produce on rooftops, a leading science commentator says.   Professor Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine, said the global food crisis was a forewarning of what could be expected as civilisation ran low on water, arable land and nutrients, and experienced soaring energy [...]