No matter how great the idea, making a business from an urban garden is no easy task. Just ask Mike Yohay, founder of San Francisco-based Cityscape Farms, which provides urban greenhouse systems for agricultural production with low water use.
The U.S. Department of the Interior has just announced $24 million in funding for new water conservation projects in western states, some of which will also save energy, too. Proving once again that a little goes a long way, the funds will be split among 54 separate projects, and when you put them all together it adds up to more than 100,000 acre-feet per year. That’s enough to provide water for about 400,000 people.
With food prices rising and access to water and land limited in many parts of the world, many are looking at food production alternatives, one of them called aquaponics.
With the current price of diesel fuel stuck at around $4.00 per gallon, our diesel-dependent agriculture industry is in a fix. But thanks to a small grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one farmer has invented a new device that
Who knows? Perhaps one gateway out of the economic doldrums will come from a boom – a bamboo boom.
Vertical farm concepts for the urban environment are not new, but now, a Swedish-American architectural design company (Plantagon) seems to have solved once of the biggest challenges of urban vertical farming: the need for uniform, sufficient natural light to provide even growth of vertically-farmed plants.
As the U.S. population grows, so does the number of cattle, and that in turn is giving rise to one heck of big, strange waste disposal problem. At least one cattle carcass recycling method that was used in the past is no longer available in this country, so billions of pounds of waste meat and bone have been classified as fit only for
A proposed US military test that we covered two years ago, of a completely novel biofuel made from Camelina by SustainableOils, is a success.
Yesterday at Edwards Air Force Base, an F-22 just flew on a jet fuel blend containing 50% renewable biofuel derived from Camelina, a weed that grows easily on marginal land without water or nitrogen, is affected neither by drought nor cold, and has 80% lower carbon emissions than conventional fuel.
We are at a point in history when innovations are needed rivaling those of the information technology industry in speed of change – for the development of farm machinery for growing and harvesting new crops that produce energy.
Yes, we all know that thing about getting high from banana peels was a 1960’s hoax, but this is the real deal. A team of researchers has found that minced banana peels can clean pollution from river water, such as lead and copper. Not only that, but they can do it more quickly and efficiently than conventional chemical water treatments. Okay, so you’d probably need a ton of bananas to clean up a big site, but the discovery does have some implications for small scale uses, especially where budgets are tight.
