It has come to that time of the year when things are starting to grow again. Some, in fact, have grown quite a bit already, such as the weeds in the flower bed in our front garden. I call it a flower bed, but it isn't really a flower bed. The original intention was for it to be a flower bed, but we haven't planted any new bulbs/seeds since uprooting some old plants we had there years ago. I'm curious about a number of things. Is there any weed killer we can use that won't leave the soil barren (i.e. unable to allow flowers/shrubs to grow) for (a) year(s) afterwards? What do you think of arguments for proponents of organic gardening/farming? Are there any chemical weed-killers that we know for a fact don't damage the soil's chemistry (or runoff water etc.)? P.S. I confess that I know very little about this topic, so if you find my wording sloppy/incorrect, please forgive me. I'm just trying to make things easier on myself - I don't want to spend half the summer weeding unless I have to.
Seeing as how most of the country has different types of problems with weeds and other troublesome plants, it would be wise that you go to your local neighborhood fertilizer supply store and get their advice on what you will need. Perhaps you could just call Home Depot or whatever type of store that carries fertilizer there and they will explain what you need to know. Another resourse is your local farm bureau or land resourse office in the government nearby you located in the phone book.
Best, foolproof weedkiller ever? Look no further than skilled labor from someone who knows which plants to pull out. Hire a bunch of people to do it for you if you don't know how. Doesn't affect the plants you're cultivating, doesn't pollute the environment (if you don't count the Doritos bags the laborers might toss out on the field). -- Long live the Female Messiah!
If you were living in Greenpeace’s paradise, in full harmony with Nature and malaria carrying mosquitoes - the Amazon jungle, and you needed to take care of the weeds, you’d have to be a woman, or look for a woman to do the job. They are the ones in charge of weeding and taking care of crops. Their husbands and sons are the ones in charge of chopping trees down, making a clear in the jungle, burn the trunks and rubbish, dig the holes for planting and finally planting the seeds. If you are lucky, you'd get a decent yield (about 10% of what you'd get in the US), if pests have not taken most of your crops away. Then you can store your grain for some weeks, hoping molds will not add too much aflatoxin B1 to your food. Support you local Greenpeace office and you’ll be sent back to this kind of heaven quite soon. In the meanwhile, support your local fertilizer and weed killer supplier, ask for advice, learn how to use the product rationally, don’t overuse it (more is not always better), and you’ll live a happy and healthy life for the rest of yours. Send a flower to Sciforums!
Hey, please stop this stereotyping! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Greenpeace, and other important conservation groups, don't seriously want to go back to some misguided noble-savage ideal. I speak as a member of Greenpeace myself: modern agriculture, with its scale and efficiency, isn't essentially wrong. It just needs to be made more sustainable and less polluting, by using biodegradable and biological pest control, more organic fertilizers, and making better use of existing farmland instead of destroying forests or wetlands to create more farmland!
I cannot but disagree with you on this, Starthane. I don’t know if your membership to Greenpeace is limited to just donating $5 or more every month, or if you are an active member (that is, and activist taking part in GM crop sabotage, or anti-nuke demonstrations, or stop-whaling shows in Zodiac boats, or devising Greenpeace policies and tactics). The real stereotype is the one depicting Greenpeace as “saving the planet” – from alleged threats and risks, real only in their minds and their political agendas. No wonder Greenpeace has been stripped from its “non profit organization” in the USA, Canada, and Brazil, and recently also of its “charitable organization” status. Here in Argentina, Greenpeace is noted for its anti-Argentinean activities, trying to stop the completion of our badly needed Atucha II nuclear station, campaigning against our CGM soybean crops (presently our major source of national income), against high power lines, electric equipment with PCB, against new industrial development; they oppose spraying insecticide against malaria and dengue carrying mosquitoes, they oppose the use of chlorine for sanitary use, and potabilization of public water supply (they advised Lima’s, Peru, authorities against water chlorination back in the 80s, bringing to the American continent the worst cholera epidemic since the 19th century, that took about 10 years to eradicate. Their insistence on sustainable agriculture is, unfortunately, not based on sound scientific research, but on flawed studies, or outright distortion of facts. Modern agriculture technology has managed to save forests by tripling crop yield while reducing crop areas to half, and allowing more people to get food by lowering costs and market prices. Farms are not being created. On the contrary, farms are being cloesed down and left by farmers who move to cities where they live better (or they think so). Biological pest control means there must be always a pest present in order for the "biological control" to work, or the "pest control" will die of starvation. That kind of bio-pest control has failed miserably back in 1984 when the medfly infestation in California. Scientists learned a lesson then and know that the only way to get rid of any pest is by total annihilation. Only one egg is enough for the pest to make a return, and start all over again. E, Bennet Metcalfe, an environmentalist from British Columbia in Canada, one of the original founders of Greenpeace, the same one who hired David McTaggart and his “Rainbow Warrior” in Auckland, back in 1985, for interfering with the French atomic test in Mururoa, says in a documentary by Magnus Gudmundsson (“A crack in the Rainbow”), the following statement regarding Greenpeace: “By the way we started then and the way it is now, I see myself as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein that created a monster that now has a life of its own.” That same documentary shows Frans Kotte, the former head of accountants in Greenpeace International, giving the secret Swiss bank account numbers of Greenpeace directors, and declaring that they “skim away millions from donations received from all over the world”. The documentary was aired by Denmark’s official TV network, TV-2 in 1989. Then comes what Bjorn Oekern, former President of Greenpeace Norway said when resigning his position back in the early 1990s, as a result of Gudmundsson’s exposè of the fraud committed by Greenpeace in its documentary on seal hunting in the High North. He said “Nothing of the money collected by Greenpeace was used for conservation of the environment,” and that “Greenpeace is a fascist organization”. If you jumped on Greenpeace’s bandwagon recently, it is clear you didn’t know anything about their background – beyond the romantic and false idea created by Greenpeace propaganda and press releases.
Wow! I'll seriously have to follow up those points you just raised, Edufer! My membership of Greenpeace is, in fact, limited to support by donation - but I jumped on the bandwagon around 1990. If the organisation has gone bad since then, I must find out just what my donations have funded. I admit, the uncompromising campaigns against GM crops have seemed paranoid and unscientific to me. GM is, after all, just a more efficient way of modifying plants than traditional selective breeding. When I referred to clearing forests for farmland, few people would deny that this is still happening on a massive scale in the tropics. In developed countries, you're correct that yields have multiplied; surplus farmland isn't usually just left to go back to nature, though. Government subsidies (in th UK, certainly) have encouraged farmers to produce more food than the country needs, and relatively little of this excess is shipped to famine regions where people would welcome it.
Starthane, you seem to be a sensible and reasonable person, so I think we can talk about the matter. One of the few people that would deny forests are being cleared on massive scale in the tropics, is me – and some thousands of people living there, and some specialists in forestry as L.S. Hamilton. I have been exploring the Amazon jungle since 1970, when I made my first expedition to the jungle for filming a documentary on a trip from Iquitos, Peru, to Ciudad Bolivar in Venezuela, in a Zodiac rubber boat, going downstream the Amazon River until Manaus, Brazil, then going upstream by the Río negro, then the Casiquiare and finally downriver by the Orinoco. You can have a glimpse of what was all about in this small webpage: http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/PhotoEng-2.html We couldn’t pass beyond Manaus, because our Zodiac broke and left us on foot. But I stayed for about 8 months in the jungle, getting enough experience and desire to keep doing trips to the jungle. So after many (yearly trips to different countries) I came to know the Amazon region quite well, and saw what was going on there, how things progressed, and how they are right now. I even moved and settled in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, when I decided I could install an Adventure Travel agency for taking tourists in expeditions into the jungle – and bring them back safely. I did it for three years, in a region known as Guarayos, southeast of the Beni region, near Mato Grosso, Brazil. The area has huge forest reserves that are being logged commercially by private contractors, under governmental concessions, and have traveled extensively through the logging area. So here is what I saw: loggers in Bolivia (and Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela too), are interested in expensive wood (mahogany or “mara”, oak, or “roble”, and many others with fancy local names as “paquió”, “cuchi”, “urunday”, etc). You’ll never find in the jungle a forest of mahogany or any other species. An hectare of jungle normally has about 220 trees, from many different species. So we can find there about 10, or 12 mahogany trees, where you can cut only those whose trunk has a diameter superior to 90 centimeters. If a logger cuts a narrower trunk goes to jail and pay huge fines. Controls on this are quite rigid, and governments do it because it was a great source of income for local authorities. So, when loggers take away all “commercial grade” trees from an hectare, they have chopped down about 35 to 40 trees in each hectare, and the average number of trees per hectare goes down from 220 to 180 or 190. This is not massive deforestation. Commercial logging also helps surrounding, smaller trees, to have access to more sunlight and develop faster. They way logging is being practiced, at least in Bolivia and Brazil, can be considered “sustainable”, because loggers move on to newer areas and don’t return to the old ones before 10-15 years. Then there is the other deforestation: tearing down forest for making room for grassing land for cattle – some ONGs say for McDonald’s hamburgers. What about Burger King? The CO2 balance here remains unaltered: they are exchanging one green cover by another green cover. Runoff and leaching of nutrients do not apply here, as the new covering (grass) prevents the rain from taking away nutrients better than the jungle. But this practice is fading because people are moving out from the jungle to more comfortable regions near cities. The vast richness of the Amazon is a fable belonging to Jules Verne books. The lateritic soils are not good for agriculture (only good soils are in the varzea area of flooding of the Amazon river, that as the Nile used to do, deposit huge quantities of nutrients on the coast when the yearly flood goes down). I would suggest you visit the UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) website, in its Forestry pages at. http://www.fao.org/forestry/index.jsp where you could have more updated information. But I would strongly advise you to read here: http://www.fao.org/docrep/u3500E/u3500e05.htm#tropical forests: identifying and clarifying issues an article by Lawrence S. Hamilton, “Tropical forests: Identifying and clarifying issues”, Research Associate at the Environment and Policy Institute. East-West Center, Honolulu. Hawaii. Note: This article is based on a paper prepared for a meeting of the Tropical Forests Task Force of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, Kuala Lumpur, 25-29 September 1990. It will give you a wider view on the forestry issue. We’ll keep talking about this, once you have gone through the recommended reading (not too long and highly clarifying).
"If you are lucky, you'd get a decent yield (about 10% of what you'd get in the US), if pests have not taken most of your crops away. Then you can store your grain for some weeks, hoping molds will not add too much aflatoxin B1 to your food." Or alternatively, Edufer, you can use modern organic farming techniques, which last I read have as a maximum about 10% lower yield than "conventional" farming methods. Which was also roughly the area the UK had in set aside land a few years ago.
Guthrie, the trouble with real organic farming is that it takes us back to the 1800s. Real organic farming abhors any chemical use on the crops, although present organic farming uses a lot of chemicals under other names or forms. Aa an example, approved pesticides for organic farmers include: • Rotenone, recently shown to induce Parkinson´s disease. • Copper sulphate, which has caused liver damage in vineyards workers, kills worms and is persistent in soil and produce (banned by the EC after 2002). • Bacillus thurigiensis, causing fatal lung infections in mice Another drawback organic crops have is the fact that they use manure for fertilizing, and manure is well known vehicle of all kinds of parasites, bacteria, and other things not too healthy for humans, as Escherichia coli, food-and-mouth disease, (perhaps mad cow disease?). Organic foods have also less nitrates and protein content than their counterpart in conventional crops. But this may be not the whole story: toxins from contaminating fungi (which can be controlled by specific fungicides) contribute to cancer rates -fumonisin and patulin are both reported to be higher in organic products, and failure to use effective fungicides has led to organic farms as repositories of disease. Indeed, conventional farmed food seems better for children. Cancer rates have dropped 15 per cent during the era of synthetic pesticide use; stomach cancer rates have dropped 50-60 per cent, probably an effect of plentiful, cheap conventional fruit and vegetables. Two principles distinguish organic farming: soluble mineral additives are banned, and synthetic herbicides and pesticides are rejected in favor of natural pesticides. The reduction in pesticide use does lead to higher levels of some insects and birds on organic farms. But currently synthetic pesticides are very unstable and only short lived declines of most field insects are reported, even when the maximum dose is used. Lower levels of aphids on organic farms could reflect lower nitrogen and protein content of crops, and lower yield -there are fewer plants for the pests to eat. Indeed, when we look at the ratio of crop yield/aphid population, the difference between organic and intensive farming is negligible. Competitive organic farmers keep fields clear of weeds using frequent mechanical weeding, which harms nesting birds, worms and invertebrates. They use more fossil fuels, which greatly increases pollution from nitrogen oxides. A single treatment with innocuous herbicide coupled with no-till conventional farming avoids this damage. The use of soluble mineral salts prohibited by the organic regulations is also contentious. Minerals taken out of farmland as produce must balance those put back by other means; organic farmers typically rely on legume nitrogen fixation, rain water or mineral recycling in the farm. The few detailed accountings suggest slow but accumulating mineral deficits, particularly of potassium and phosphate, in organic farmlands. This I saw clearly in the Bolivian potato fields, in the Andes hillsides. Indians there practice a real organic agriculture, but the soil degrades fast to a point where potatoes are as small as nuts. The indians must switch then to other crops as maize, corn, pumpkin, and other plants. If we wanted to be rational, there are lots more against the use of organic agriculture, besides the horrible look their produce have in the supermarket. If you want to hear more about it, just ask! But I am sure you wouldn't like to hear about Australian environmental laws that converted Australia from a food supplier to a net food importer. The "Back to Wilderness" laws in Australia allow any organization, or even individuals, to propose any piece of productive land to be sent back to wilderness - no matter if in that land there is an ancient well established and properous farm or cattle ranch providing jobs and food for many. "Catchment laws" in Australia are also ridiculous, as many Australians in this sciforum know. In catchment areas you cannot modify anything, make no dams or channels, etc. Progress and advancement are outlawed. As "catchment area" is any area where it rains, the whole continent is a Catchment area! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Unbelievable!
Thank you for the links, Edufer: I'll read them ASAP. It would be nice indeed to know that tropical forests are not so endangered as most people believe. What motivates most concern, of course, is the statistics about how many species are steadily wiped out as old-growth forests fall. Do you believe that such ecosystems can be developed, sustainably or otherwise, without sacrificing some of their biodiversity? I'll confess that I've never SEEN a rainforest, except on TV. You clearly know what you're talkng about. It's different with temperate woodlands, of course, often dominated by 1 tree species. The biodiversity in Britain, for example, is probably greater now - with a manmade mosaic of habitats and successional stages - than it would have been when the country was virtually all climax forest. Then again, we don't really know how many species were lost by breaking up the continuous European forests of prehistoric times.
Something that worries many people is the “extinction” issue, because ecologists give a variety of figures that scare everybody. They claim that the rate of extinction will wipe thousands of species every year, claiming the there are about 40.000 species extinct in the last 20 years or so. Actually, these figures are projection from extrapolations from assumptions made 20 years ago, in a study plagued by methodology errors and false assumptions, calculating the rate of extinction in function of square mile of habitat, and many other variables that were impossible to calculate accurately, or even prove the existence of such variable. Actually, the recorded extinction amount to very few species, relating to animals, because vegetables, fish, and insects are extremely difficult to prove there has been an extinction. The Dodo bird, from Mauritius Islands, and the Tasmanian “tiger” are the only two well documented extinct species: the dodo back in the 1700s, and the Tasmanian tiger back in the 1930s. They say the mergus octosetaceus, or “Pato Serrucho” (saw duck) living in the Iguazú Falls area in Argentina was extinct in the 70s, (although I filmed a big flock of them in the Uruguaí river back in 1972). But recently the saw duck was taken out of the endangered list. It was a lie, part of a campaign to stop the building of a hydroelectric dam in the Uruguaí river. As it seems you live in England, I will point you to a nice website (not being updated, though) http://www.probiotech.fsnet.co.uk/ with very useful and enlightening information about rain forests, savannahs, biotechnology, and other environmental issues. It belongs to an emeritus professor from London University, Philip Stott, who now runs another website at http://greenspin.blogspot.com/ Professor Stott has published a small booklet, downloadable free from http://www.iea.org.uk/files/upld-publication2pdf?.pdf where he gives a lot of information on the subject of rain forests, savannahs, global warming, etc. The introduction may interest you, so I quote from it:: ‘Tropical rain forest’ does not exist as an object; it is a human construct and is thus subject to myth making on a grand scale. According to the ‘Worry Index’ issued at the end of 1998 by the Infratest Institute, the biggest anxiety in Germany is the perceived destruction of tropical rain forest, a fear shared by 86 per cent of the German population. The aims of this booklet are to deconstruct such Northern ‘Green’ neo-colonial concerns about the entity ‘tropical rain forest’ and to analyse critically the myths employed to add legitimacy to such concerns. It is argued that these myths have become examples of what are termed ‘hegemonic myths’, which exclude other myths from world policy debate. http://www.probiotech.fsnet.co.uk/trfseminar.html
oohh, persuasive. But this: "Cancer rates have dropped 15 per cent during the era of synthetic pesticide use; stomach cancer rates have dropped 50-60 per cent, probably an effect of plentiful, cheap conventional fruit and vegetables." Cant be right, because, simply put, all the information ive ever seen says that cancer is on the increase. "Another drawback organic crops have is the fact that they use manure for fertilizing, and manure is well known vehicle of all kinds of parasites, bacteria, and other things not too healthy for humans, as Escherichia coli, food-and-mouth disease, (perhaps mad cow disease?). " And as for that, thats why you let it decay and do whatever it does first. or even better, let it sit and collect the gas off it, burn that, and you end up with decent fertiliser. (i forget what the process is called.) And mad cow disease is more likely either a result of careless use of organophosphates and feeding cows bits of other cows, than of organic techniques.
Guthrie: "Cant be right, because, simply put, all the information ive ever seen says that cancer is on the increase." Then you haven't been getting the right information. Don't believe ME, just pay a visit to sites at the American Cancer Society, American Cancer Institute, the World Health Organization, and other health related issues, and see cancer statistics. It is a fact. You'll see for yourself. As mad cow disease, I did not imply it was caused by organic farming, but that manure is a likely vector (or vehicle) for transmission to humans. You seem to jump into conclusions too fast.
I have seen rain forests. I've also seen the cleared fields where rain forests once stood. I looked into the natural history of a tree that remained growing, isolated and uncut on one otherwise cleared field in Costa Rica. It is expected to go extinct because they are now too few and far between. Apparently according to satellite data recently reported, the rate of rain forest destruction has increased dramatically over the last couple of years. Do a little searching and you can see the data yourself and other studies which can only be discounted by the insane. But I should bite my tongue and it's skeptical utterings. Edufer is the champion of truth and I should just learn to stop worrying and be happy. Heck, why should I want to breath anyways and want other species and habitats to survive. Sheesh, I need to get real egotistical and learn to love small things, preferably dead.
Mr Chips: “I looked into the natural history of a tree that remained growing, isolated and uncut on one otherwise cleared field in Costa Rica. It is expected to go extinct because they are now too few and far between. “I would like to know if you could give me more details of such tree. Perhaps you can find its species? It is an interesting case, because a tree species don’t usually go extinct just because it disappears from a given area. If that tree grew in Costa Rica, then it has also grown in neighboring countries, but surely under other local name. But perhaps this is just the only recorded case of a tree species going extinct – something I find extremely unbelievable, as there are many organizations that would take the appropriate measures for preventing it. They would take its seeds, and seeds from other far apart trees, or pollen from their flowers and get the trees on producing seeds for continuing the species. But then, I don’t fully understand your sarcasm. You have made me the champion of truth, and I am grateful for that, but I don’t see what’s the point you want to make. Perhaps you resent my being optimistic, based on the observation of scientific facts and past experience. The data I manage is the one provided by the World Forestry Association, whose link I have provided. Perhaps some study from your part on the reports they provide may give you a different, less pessimistic view. I think that all of us in this thread, and most of the people on Earth share your desire of breathing and letting other species to live, but I cannot share your intentions of loving things, big or small, preferably dead. I rather love while they are living things. And that’s what we are working for in our Foundation for a Scientific Ecology, here in Argentina. We want to save as much people from dying from diseases caused by sheer poverty around the world, poverty caused by greed and political ambitions displayed by so many governmental aid agencies and non-governmental organizations. A very simple example is their stubborn refuse to bring back and use DDT for fighting malaria, the biggest killer in poor countries. You should read the article published in The New York Times on April 10th, 2004, “What the world needs now is DDT”, at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/11DDT.html Perhaps you didn’t know that malaria kills about 5000 children and youngsters every day, according to the WHO statistics. I care and resent a lot about that, but perhaps you care more about trees and butterflies.
I would have to register with the NYT to get that article. You want to post some salient parts? I do believe there are other ways to kill mosquitos and this would first of all mean getting the information and the tools to do so to the people in these areas. We also need to create decent housing in more hospitable areas and help people move there en masse. Once they learn of the dangers they would probably be willing if we could truly promise better living conditions. I am of the opinion that if humans get their information handling togethor enough to survive the information explosion, we will be leaving many occupations behind. I suspect, as Buckminster Fuller did, that all of those skycrapers for banks and insurance companies and many other companies that lie idle every night will be turned into apartment complexes as we lose the use of token economics. We are destroying rain forests now quicker than they can recover and that is based on some pretty extensive and sound data. Species are being lost and this is not on the basis of projection. Appears to me that you have a general over-all opinion that doesn't challenge the status quo to which you bend and slur the facts. You would have us raze the forests, burn more fossil fuels, spray and use known carcinogens just because you can't face that which will require some change in the distribution of power on the planet. You have no real answers so you are claiming there are no real problems. Seems to me I am witnessing another victim of anomie. Your lofty sounding desires haven't a chance in hell of being realized if you must disagree with predominant science but then many a road is paved with good intentions. Whether or not global warming is happening I am of the strong opinion that we need to keep the oxygen producing plants and carbon dioxide sinks healthy and plant more like our lives depended on it. We live in a space colony. We either start acting in tune with that reality or we are going to lose the ability to act at all.
BTW, I have had many gardens. First of all, investigate every so-called weed. People don't realize we have nutrituious, beautiful medicinal herbs all around we callously call weeds. Plant ones that get along togethor well in close proximity (companion planting) and use well formed compost to mulch heavily. If done properly, you can have a relatively weed free garden with only minimal hand weeding necessary. Planting native species can help. Sounds like food crops are not being considered as the subject for this thread but check out http://www.motherearthnews.com/menarch/archive/issues/061/061-092-01.htm
Dr. Chips: “Species are being lost and this is not on the basis of projection.” The claim of species extinctions are based solely in statistical projections you like it or not. Name me JUST ONE species in the world (animal, fish, plant, bacteria) that has gone extinct in the last 100 years – besides the Tasmanian tiger. How can they know if a species has gone extinct if they have not surveyed the whole Earth? And that is an impossible task. Species might “disappear” from one area, because they moved to a neighboring one, as the “yaguareté”, the american jaguar that once reached down to Patagonia, and now is confined to the jungles in the north part of Argentina, the jungles areas of Paraguay, Bolivia, and the rest of countries in the Amazon basin. But the fact of moving to newer, less habitated areas concentrate the species, and jaguars abound so much in their newer habitats that have become a threat to villagers in the Amazon. I can assure you that if you go into the jungle for a walk, without taking along a carbine or a shotgun, you will not return home. There is no need to hunt or kill the jaguars; they simply don't attack people carrying a carbine, or what looks like a carbine. Why is this, nobody knows, but jaguars know why they must refrain from attacking people with guns. As I said, I have traveled and lived for years (1970-2001) in the Amazon jungle, from Venezuela to Paraguay, Brazil and Ecuador, to Peru and Bolivia, and have seen everything is there to see. See here: http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/photoEng-2.html The article in the New York is quite long and I have uploaded it to our foundation’s server for you to read. The link to it is this: http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/Pesti/DDTNow.html The link is to our page “Chemicals and Pesticides”, where there is a fairly large amount of material on the DDT subject, as well as other chemicals and health related risks. I am sure you will disagree with all we publish there. But, who knows, perhaps you will get in touch with material you didn’t know it existed – and that’s dangerous, because the sound of a different bell might get you into deep trouble with yourself.
