AGRIBUSINESS: Farmer uses fish waste to grow vegetables.

AGRIBUSINESS: Farmer uses fish waste to grow vegetables. Farmer uses fish waste to grow vegetables. Dickson Mosota opted out of buying nitrogenous fertilizers for his vegetable garden,he eliminated these costs by tapping fish pond water for irrigation as well as for the supply of nutrients. AGRIBUSINESS: Farmer uses fish waste to grow vegetables. Fish waste are rich in urea, which is a compound of nitrogen and other elements. Nitrogen is one of the basic mineral elements responsible for the vegetative growth in crops. It is a macro nutrient in photosynthesis, the process of making food in green plants. AGRIBUSINESS: Farmer uses fish waste to grow vegetables. Dickson Mosota realized that when he used the water from his integrated fish pond, the vegetables on top of the chicken and rabbit hatch did well. Chickens and rabbits drop their faecal matter into the water to support the growth of algae for the fish. When the fish excrete, the accumulating waste has other minerals elements that accelerate the growth hormones in the crops. Nitrogen is the main component in urea. The farmer drains the 4m by 8m pond monthly besides the regular circulation. more

AGRIBUSINESS :Drying vegetables increases shelf life to over eight months.

AGRIBUSINESS :Drying vegetables increases shelf life to over eight months. Drying vegetables increases shelf life to over eight months. 

Dried vegetables can last for more than eight months without expiring/spoiling.The inclusion of a solar dryer. into production has increased the shelf-life of vegetables from two days to more than eight months, allowing Kisii County farmer,

 Jared Otundo, sell his vegetables for longer and in  faraway places.  

 Otundo says drying the black night shade and spider flower vegetables has helped him reduce rotting losses to zero.

Unlike fresh vegetables that require disposal within two days, he can hold on until when the market fetches more. 

During rainy seasons, the oversupply of the vegetables lead to low prices. This is his time of accumulating and drying the two varieties and stocking.

 The solar equipment has a special chamber for blowing away moisture. The vegetables lose the moisture, but the colour remains the same. After packaging and sealing in labeled polythene bags, the cargo is less bulky for transporting. source

New approach to evaluating agricultural development programs.

New approach to evaluating agricultural development programs. A new research has shown that involving locals in figuring out how to improve their farming and fishing methods provides more lasting and widespread benefits than just introducing new technologies or methods. As the old saying goes, teaching someone to fish is far more helpful than just giving them a fish. Now, research from WorldFish and MIT takes that adage a step further: Better yet, the study found, is working with the fishermen to help develop better fishing methods. The findings are described in the journal Agricultural Systems, shows that over the last few decades has shown that bringing about improvements in agricultural systems is a highly complex challenge, with many interrelationships and feedbacks determining how well new methods and devices take hold or provide a real improvement. Yet government agencies as well as research and nonprofit organizations still mostly evaluate the success of their programs using simple metrics that overlook much of this complexity. more

High levels of antibiotic-resistance in Indian poultry farming raises concerns.

High levels of antibiotic-resistance in Indian poultry farming raises concerns.A new study from India raises questions about the dangers to human health of farming chicken with growth-promoting antibiotics -- including some of the same drugs used in raising millions of chickens in the United States and worldwide. The study, led by researchers from the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) and published in Environmental Health Perspectives, found high levels of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in chickens raised for both meat and eggs on farms in India's Punjab state. The study has serious implications, not only for India but globally, as Overuse of antibiotics in animal farms endangers all of us. We must remove antibiotics from the human food chain, except to treat sick animals, or face the increasingly real prospect of a post-antibiotic world.more

Aquaponics at Home: A Modern Farmer Review of Turnkey Aquaponics Systems for All Levels.

Aquaponics at Home: A Modern Farmer Review of Turnkey Aquaponics Systems for All Levels. Aquaponics—an environmentally-friendly mash-up of aquaculture and hydroponics—is just beginning to take off at a commercial level. But for homesteaders and hobbyists, it’s more feasible than ever to raise catfish and tomatoes together, whether in your garden, greenhouse, or a sunny window. Poopy fish water provides irrigation and nutrients to the produce, which in turn filter the water for the fish. more

The Amazing New Way to Grow Tomatoes: In Tomato Waste.

The Amazing New Way to Grow Tomatoes: In Tomato Waste. Closed-loop systems, in which waste is used as a nutrient (usually) could well be one of the futures of farming: The goals of minimizing waste and optimizing energy use are rubrics that are becoming increasingly essential. But here's one we haven't heard of before, at least not in quite this way: turning tomato waste into a medium for growing tomatoes. A new study out of New Zealand and published in the journal HartScience, comes up with a way to reuse green waste in a hydroponic system—and even better, that waste can come from the crop itself. There are two main concepts to understand here before you can grasp exactly why this is such an interesting idea. The first is biochar, which is basically charcoal created from “green waste,” which is exactly what you think it is. Charcoal is created through heat in an environment without oxygen; often that’s done by burying. The biochar in this study comes from the waste of tomato plants (stems, roots, leaves). The other concept is the substrate. In a hydroponic system, when a plant is planted in what’s basically a moving stream of water in which nutrients are dissolved, the substrate is a porous bit of…something…that holds the plants in place. Most commonly the substrate is spun rock (a.k.a. rock wool), which is basically cotton candy made of rock. Sawdust is also a pretty popular substrate. more

How to make biochar and increase soil fertility.

How to make biochar and increase soil fertility. For hundreds of years, rain forest farmers have figured out that you can enrich soil with biochar: charcoal, basically. Wet vegetation is burned, producing little bits of charcoal, which are ground into the soil. Eventually, this creates an incredibly rich,fertile soil. In only the past few years, researchers at universities around the world have realized that the Amazonian technique is replicated in various forms around the world, including West Africa. This new study, led by researchers at the University of Sussex, analyzed 177 sites in Liberia and Ghana and proved that biochar additions, practiced for centuries in these areas, have increased the carbon levels in the soil by two to three times. By living in villages in these countries, researchers described the techniques: ash and bones, along with kitchen waste, are recycled back into the soil. The press release for the study says the practice could help mitigate climate change. What they mean by that is that the biochar method transfers carbon to the soil, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. The infamous slash-and-burn method, in which material like trees and plants are simply burned in open fires, transfers a very small percentage of carbon to the soil, releasing much of it into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. But slash-and-char, in which wet vegetation under a layer of straw is burned into charcoal, is much more efficient, transferring almost half of its carbon content into the soil.more