Word: corns
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Joseph Odiambo walks decisively past eight plots of corn and comes to a stop in front of the ninth. Where the other plants towered sugar-cane thick with broad crisp blades, here the plants are skinny and stunted, draped with yellow-tinged leaves. The contrast is deliberate, an advertisement for the wares Odiambo sells from his roadside supply shop in western Kenya. While the shopkeeper's robust plots were planted with commercial seed and carefully nurtured with inorganic fertilizer, his sickly specimens are the result of seeds sown in the bare ground. "We wanted to have a control plot...
...case for organic farming is a strong one. A 22-year study led by David Pimentel, a professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, that was published in 2005, found that organic farms produced just as much corn and soybeans as conventional farms. While they required more labor, the cost was more than offset by savings in commercial nitrogen, insecticides and herbicides. In Africa, where labor is cheap and capital scarce, the benefits would be magnified. According to Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, past green revolutions boosted production of wheat and rice at the expense of other food. Using land...
...hasn't changed in over a century is a feature, not a bug. It provides an opportunity to replace industrial farming with organic practices that can be just as productive, but far more sustainable. At the St. Jude Family project in southern Uganda, double-decker animal pens open onto corn, cabbage, bananas and crawling green beans. The earth is contoured to reduce runoff and erosion. Spring onions serve as natural pest control. Legumes fix nitrogen to the soil. Cow manure produces biogas for the farm's stove. Farm owner Josephine Kizza says her project has introduced organic techniques...
...indeed have become an environmental problem," says DeVries. "In Africa we're seeing that underutilization is the problem." When degraded soil blows away, frustrated farmers turn to the forests for more land. A farmer applying as little as a coke-bottle cap of fertilizer for each stalk of corn could potentially triple his yields - and benefit the environment. "We're not going to deny Africa these technologies," he says. "How could...
...also studied a 100-year time horizon, which makes the numbers look a bit better for corn and soy, but makes no sense: Who knows if we're going to use biofuels or gas or even automobiles for the next 100 years? Scientists believe we need to reduce our emissions 80% by 2050 to avoid catastrophe; the notion that we should tear down our rain forests and peatlands today in the hope that our cars will burn a bit cleaner a century from now is political analysis, not environmental analysis. "That's something we'll have to take into account...