Agriculture Blog

With rare exception, the average American consumer could summarize their feelings toward agriculture in two words: necessary evil. The media has inundated our culture with images of DDT and Cyanide until common people immediately associate farming with the application of “dangerous chemicals.”

By the same token, it is rare that these same brainwashed individuals will go into a grocery store and bypass the produce aisle. Never mind that their vegetables came from a third-world producer that uses human feces as fertilizer; they need to make a Food Channel-worthy salad.

So where, exactly, do we draw the line between reckless worry and self-seeking indulgence? Let’s shed some truth on the subject: American growers no longer use agents such as DDT, period. Rat poison-style chemicals have been banned for decades, and those used today are largely eco-friendly. Does that mean you shouldn’t wash your fruit and vegetables? No; it’s still a good practice, if only to ensure the safety of those crops that came from outside our borders.

Is there still room for earth-conscious improvement in agriculture? As in every arena of American industry, there’s always some space for things to get better. For instance, there remains in agriculture the mindset that organic processes Read the rest of this entry »

Buying land for land investment purposes has permeated the national consciousness, but owning English land remains a privilege, writes Alex Way.

There can be little doubt that the rate of residential property development on UK land is set to rise markedly in the next ten to fifteen years. Yet the Government’s house-building plans – 3 million new homes on UK land by 2020 or 250,000 per annum for the next twelve years –
are manifestly ambitious, given house-building levels are currently running at around 165,000 per year. The Government proposes that one million new homes can in fact be accommodated on ‘Brownfield’ English land, although many commentators question whether there is sufficient viable development land classified as ‘Brownfield’ for this proposal to be realistic. The implication then, although the Government is loath to admit it, is that property development on some Greenbelt UK land is inevitable.

It is not that UK land development is not sufficiently lucrative for
property development firms which explains why too few homes are currently being built on English land. It is more the fact that the UK land planning system is highly restrictive and that the supply of development Read the rest of this entry »

What form of hands-off investment has on average returned over three times the profit of real estate investment (and completely shattered stock market returns) over the last two decades?

The answer is land investment. And despite the fact that returns on land investments have consistently been nothing short of spectacular, the future looks even brighter.

It’s a fact that land investment has returned (on average) over 900% for investors over a 20 year period and with a serious shortage of this natural commodity in several global spots such as the United Kingdom, the capital gains for shrewd investors are likely to get even bigger.

In this article we’ll look at the exact factors you should consider before purchasing land as an investment.

Land shares some interesting similarities with real estate when it comes to evaluating its potential for capital growth. In this segment we’ll look at how to assess land locations so that you choose the best plots of land that are likely to explode in value quickly.

Here are the two main factors that you must consider when evaluating potential land plots for investment:

1. Location, Location, Location (And Did I Mention Location?)

Read the rest of this entry »

Agriculture is the source of our bread, our milk, and essentially every piece of food we put in our mouths. Now agriculture is becoming a source for fuel which makes agriculture even more important to our nation.

The importance of agriculture means that as a country we need to put more money and effort into developing fertilizers, and farming techniques that replenish the ground. Developing environmentally safe pesticides or combating different crop killers with passive techniques is important to maintaining the environment to support the growth of our food. There are already plenty of natural disasters that destroy thousands of crops per year ranging from grain to fruit. Agriculture needs to develop different products to stand against all of the other things, bugs, viruses, and the introduction of new plant or animal species through immigration.

Agriculture should grow by becoming a part of every man, woman, and child’s life. Too often people have no recognition or thought about where their food comes from. With the growing possibility of food crises becoming an issue in the near future for our country and others, agriculture education should become a requirement. No longer should farms live in rural areas but each person should Read the rest of this entry »

As a consumer citizen living in a town, I have often reflected on the fact that all the food I eat comes from the country.

I depend on agriculture, on the more reason, considering that I’m vegetarian and my food, not including meat and fish, is based on cultivated vegetables and also milk, eggs and their derivatives come from bred animals, fed with fodder and agriculture products.

So, I must expect a good quality from my food at reasonable prices, but a good part of it comes from mass productions, performed with monoculture and massive use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers that I can only hope are not found in sensible traces in the final products; this means to hope that the sanitary controls are not symbolic or made with superficiality, under the pressure of food multinationals and also that cereals and fruits I buy, like canned maize or soybeans, are not transgenic, like those from the U.S., South America and China, but still not from Europe.

For this reason, I try to buy as much as possible organic agriculture, made following natural but modern methods, in equilibrium with the environment of which cultivations are always part.

In my Country, about Read the rest of this entry »