agriculture

Water Heroes: Ma Tsepo Khumbane – Harvesting Rainwater to Grow Crops

This week’s water hero, Ma Tsepo Khumbane, is a retired social worker and development activist who has spent the last 40 years fighting poverty and malnutrition by teaching South Africa’s poor how to harvest rainwater to be used to grow their own crops, as well as speaking out for better sanitation and hygiene practices.  Due to her extraordinary efforts she has received the Katlego Award of Spirit of Hope and South Africa’s Women in Water Award, but maybe even morecontinue reading

Growing Vegetables from the Sea

Agriculture uses 70% of the world’s available freshwater every year.  With 20% of the world’s population living without access to adequate water giving 70% to agriculture is not very sustainable.  Good thing there are really smart people out there, and some of them came up with a system of using the ocean’s abundant source of water to irrigate crops, an idea that transformed into seawater greenhouses. The idea of seawater greenhouses was brought to the world in 1991 by acontinue reading

Pakistan, Flooding, and Agroforestry

Pakistan is a place with an extreme climate that can go from scorching hot to cold pounding rains throughout the year.  The hottest temperature on the continent of Asia and the fourth highest temperature in the world was recorded in Pakistan at 128.3 F.  It also deals with cyclones and tornados with the onset of the monsoon season from April to July.  However, the most devastating climate related event may be the flooding in Pakistan. In 1950 flooding killed 2,910continue reading

Water Saving Technologies: Film Farming

I recently ran across an article on an amazing new technology being introduced in the farming industry called film farming.  This system was released by Dubai-based owners Agricel back in March, but has been in development for a number of years.  Realizing that the world will be facing water and food shortages in the coming years Agricel wanted to come up with a solution, and it looks like they did.  This technology reduces the amount of water and fertilizer neededcontinue reading

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