With the FAO estimating that annually between 20 to 40 percent of global crop production are lost to pests, it is no surprise that pesticides have become a mainstay of modern farming, with approximately 5.6 billion pounds used worldwide. The use of pesticides reduces the effect of pest attacks diseases and weeds, thus contributing to […]
Month: October 2020
On Nutrient Pollution, Part 5: Bad HABits: Find out how these Seaweeds are solving the eutrophication problem with this one weird tip, Phytoplankton hate them! (sic)
This one is a doozy, it has two (2) memes and almost 1k words!
You know what they say: “Twice the memes double the effort.”
I don’t think this counts as 2 posts per week, but I’d like to think it does because it makes the stress of falling behind go away for a while. 🙂
Mini-post: Choleric on CO2
There is perhaps no other greenhouse gas as prolific as CO2, which is produced by a myriad of anthropogenic sources, from large scale burning of fossil fuels to something as simple as breathing. For us, we shall be briefly discussing the role of agriculture in CO2 emissions. Food systems from production to consumption, contribute 19%–29% […]
On Nutrient Pollution, Part 4: Bad HABits: Our Toxic Relationship with Toxic Algae
On our last post, we discussed the impacts of HABs, such as hypoxia and reduction of light in the water column, however we left discussion of algal toxins aside as that opens a whole can of worms that deserves its own post. Harmful algal blooms can generally be divided into three categories (Hallegraeff, Anderson, & […]
Mini Post: Mad about Methane
A small post between larger ones, I shall pass some gas, a small poot of writing about Methane (CH4). Methane is one of the gases the contributes to the greenhouse effect on earth. How does it relate to agricultural pollution? Cattle account for about 75% of methane emissions from livestock and 37% of ALL methane […]
On Nutrient Pollution, Part 3: Bad HABits, Harmful Algal Blooms (HAB) and Agricultural waste
Now before we explain HABs, we first need to understand what algae are. Although commonly thought to just be aquatic version of plants, in truth they are far from that. Algae are an extremely diverse group of organisms and despite their similarities that have led scientists of times past to classify them together, not all […]