Farming News - Agriculture News - SeedDaily.com brings you daily news on land, seed, water food news. http://www.seeddaily.com/index.html Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT en-us A water crisis brewing between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over a contentious Nile dam could escalate into a conflict with "severe humanitarian consequences", a think-tank said on Wednesday. Egypt, which relies almost totally on the Nile for irrigation and drinking water, fears the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam being built on the Blue Nile could reduce its water supplies. Talks on the is]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT The weedkiller Roundup was a "substantial factor" in the cancer of a US man who developed a lump in his throat after decades of spraying his garden - the second major legal defeat to agrochemical giant Monsanto in a year. Edwin Hardeman, 70, treated his property in Sonoma County, California, regularly with the herbicide from 1980 to 2012 and was eventually diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymph]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT The weedkiller Roundup was a "substantial factor" in the cancer of a US man who developed a lump in his throat after decades of spraying his garden - the second major legal defeat to agrochemical giant Monsanto in a year. Edwin Hardeman, 70, treated his property in Sonoma County, California, regularly with the herbicide from 1980 to 2012 and was eventually diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymph]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT An EPFL study has prompted scientists to rethink a standard approach used to calculate the velocity of gas exchange between mountain streams and the atmosphere. Research conducted in streams in Vaud and Valais indicate that equations used to predict gas exchange based on data from lowland streams undershoots the actual gas exchange velocity in mountain streams on average by a factor of 100. ]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT Manila has been hit by its worst water shortage in years, leaving bucket-bearing families to wait hours to fill up from tanker trucks and some hospitals to turn away less urgent cases. Taps are dry from four to 20 hours per day in the homes of about half of the Philippine capital's roughly 12 million people due to rolling outages driven by a dearth of rain and inadequate infrastructure. ]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT A China-funded project to bottle water from Russia's Lake Baikal has caused a backlash in Siberia, where people are increasingly angry about what they see as a Chinese land-grab. Ecologists and local authorities have previously touted bottling the water of the world's largest lake as a "green" way of profiting from Siberia's natural resources. But a petition calling on Russian "patriots]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT Plastic bottles and containers at the ready, Keisy Perez ignores the stench from the brown river as it slips slowly through the grimy San Agustin district of Venezuela's capital. The quest for drinkable water has rapidly become an obsession for millions like her in Caracas days after a crippling power blackout stalled the city's pumps. In this part of Caracas, the Guaire river is effec]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT Hundreds of Kurds gathered in the Iraqi town of Halabja on Saturday in a tearful ceremony commemorating Saddam Hussein's poison gas attack there which killed some 5,000 people, mostly women and children. On March 16, 1988, Saddam's forces unleashed a cocktail of deadly gases on the northern farming community, captured a day before by Kurdish fighters who had sided with nearby Iran in the cou]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT Farmers irrigating their crops may soon be getting some help from space. In 2018, scientists launched ECOSTRESS, a new instrument now attached to the International Space Station. Its mission: to gather data on how plants use water across the world. "Technically, the instruments are measuring surface temperature, which reflects the heat stress of plants," explains Joshua Fisher of NASA's Je]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT Starting in September, New York city's 1.1 million school students will eat vegetarian meals on "Meatless Mondays," Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday. "Cutting back on meat a little will improve New Yorkers' health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Democrat de Blasio said. The program, which began in 15 Brooklyn schools almost a year ago with vegetarian breakfasts and lunches on ]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT President Ivan Duque asked Colombia's constitutional court Thursday to modify a ban on aerial spraying of the herbicide glyphosate in order to tackle record cocaine crops. "My respectful request is for the decision to be modified... a modification that takes into account the fact that the growth of these plantations is tremendously damaging to constitutional order, legal order, the environm]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT An EU court ruled Thursday that the bloc's food watchdog must make public studies about the toxic or carcinogenic nature of glyphosate, a key ingredient in weedkiller. The General Court annulled decisions by the European Food Safety Authority "refusing access to the toxicity and carcinogenicity studies on the active substance glyphosate," the court said in a statement. The Luxembourg-bas]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT China's removal of the export permit of a major Canadian canola company followed the discovery of "hazardous pests" in shipments, the foreign ministry said Wednesday in a move that has stoked diplomatic tensions. Canada's largest agricultural handler, Winnipeg-based Richardson International, had its licence to ship canola to China revoked on March 1, which risks leaving Canadian farmers with]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT For the first time, scientists have taken a biomedical approach to measuring the impacts of pesticides on bumblebees and their genes. Their findings, published in the journal Molecular Ecology, suggest insecticides alter dozens of genes responsible for a diverse array of biological processes. Most studies measuring the impacts of pesticides on bees focus on bee behavior and healt]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT From the wind-whipped surface of the open ocean, to trillions of tiny water drops in clouds, the air-water interface - water's skin - is the site for crucial natural processes, including ocean-atmosphere exchange and cloud acidification. The air-water interface has even been postulated as the cradle of life. However, factors such as its subnanometer size and dynamic nature, render the inve]]> Wed, 20 Mar 2019 05:10:11 GMT