Posts Tagged ‘pesticides’

The Unconventional Harvest: A Large No-Till Organic Farm

I met Emily Stiegelmeier near Route 12 at the intersection of two long and lonely dirt roads near her 4,000 acre farm.

Collecting a Wild Honeybee Swarm (video)

In this video, beekeeper Matt Reed demonstrates how to collect a wild honeybee swarm comprising about 7000 honeybees. A swarm is the natural mechanism for bees to divide the colony in order to find a new home.

Spiders Help Farmers Grow Safer Crops (video)

October 04, 2010 The continued dependence on pesticides and chemicals to kill unwanted insects in agriculture fields in China has led to an unhealthy situation. “It’s time to look at alternatives.”, says Dr. Zhao, of Hubei University. Educating farmers about the benefits of many spiders has been key toward finding a balance between pest and [...]

Behind Mass Die-Offs, Pesticides Lurk as Culprit

January 7, 2010 Environment 360 “In the past dozen years, three new diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, honeybees, and — most recently — bats. Increasingly, scientists suspect that low-level exposure to pesticides could be contributing to this rash of epidemics.” With all the environmental problems swirling around us, this stunning article provides a glimpse [...]

Genesis of the USDA’s National Organic Program

How the Federal Government came to regulate the organic industry Part 4: My previous column on the history of organic agriculture wrapped up with a look at the burgeoning national market that emerged during the 1980’s. Counterculture back-to-the-landers and die-hard traditionalist farmers were raising crops and livestock without agro-chemicals and growing numbers of consumers were [...]

The Organic Certification Process

Early Beginnings Part 3: I’ve devoted the first two installments in this series to exploring the dual wellsprings that gave rise to organic agriculture. Organic Agriculture: Its Origins and Evolution delved into Sir Albert Howard’s pioneering vision of organic agriculture as a self-regulating system of integrated crop and livestock production that provides optimal nutrition for [...]

Industrial Agriculture and the Organic Alternative: Rachel Carson’s Contribution

Part 2: My introductory post on organic farming (Organic Agriculture: Its Origins, and Evolution Over Time) highlighted Sir Albert Howard’s role in describing its fundamental practices and principles. Seeing Nature as the most efficient and enduring of all farmers, Howard portrayed organic agriculture as a holistic endeavor inseparable from a farm’s environmental conditions. In Howard’s [...]

Call Of The Honeybees (video)

Ever since Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” first appeared, warning us against the dangers of chemicals in our natural world—we seem to be entering a new, more dangerous period, where the accumulated human effects upon the environment are producing an obvious toll. In this story, another human soul speaks out, this time, about the plight [...]