AGRI NEWS NET

Brown algae take up large amounts of carbon dioxide from the air and release parts of the carbon contained therein back into the environment in mucous form. This mucus is hard to break down for other ocean inhabitants, thus the carbon is removed from the atmosphere for a long time, as researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen now show.

Weekly headlines

An apple a day may keep the livestock veterinarian away. Juice, pulp, and other waste from Empire apples, when injected into chicken eggs before hatching, show signs of boosting the animal's intestinal health, according to Cornell research.

Biodiversity loss may be the harbinger of a more devastating ecological collapse, an international team of scientists have discovered. By exploring the stability and collapse of marine ecosystems during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, researchers have gained worrying insights into the modern biodiversity crisis, given that the rate of species loss today outpaces that during the event, known as the ‘Great Dying’. 

The solution to both these problems is simple. Its carbon, the fact that it is in the atmosphere rather than in the soil. The Green Revolution and industrialisation of agriculture have been everything but green. 

Headlines of the week

Weeklikse opsomming Landbou Prof Johan Willemse

Scars remain from nearly all of Africa having been aggressively colonised. Greed mixed with racism to crush long-standing social structures while looting resource wealth. However, many of today’s most dynamic economies are former colonies. Their impressive successes followed colonialism’s uprooting of conventions which were becoming outdated. Perhaps colonialism should be categorised as a particularly ugly phase among a long series of highly disruptive industrial-era advances.