What visitors may see are a soot-encrusted kettle, an equally-black pot for boiling rice and cassava (the staple foods), some rolled-up mats and woolly, floral-print blankets. On average, a four-member household will get about 500 square metres which often don t produce enough for everyone. Over 67% of the 21,753 households in this district farm land for self-consumption; a few earn extra Vietnamese Dong (VND) from raising cattle, chicken and pigs. Harvests are not occasions to celebrate...

The work will facilitate the identification of genes that control target traits characters that are important for developing new plant varieties able to meet the demands of sustainable agriculture, climate change and bio-renewables. According to Professor Ian King, who heads the research team at the West Wales-based station, a key driver of the research would be the development of plant varieties that were able to meet the demand for increased output coupled with the need to adapt to...

Otherwise, the existing setup appears to be just more counterproductive agriculture subsidies, cynically concocted in the name of national security and the environment. Increasingly, companies have to be concerned with "agflation", the soaring price of agricultural commodities due to the heightened demand for corn (which, as you learned in econ 101, increases prices for corn substitutes, like rice and wheat) You'd think, then, that with the market doing a good job of sorting things out,...

In 10 years, city officials expect the population could reach 30,000 as commuters buy up houses for a fraction of what they would spend in Sacramento. Much of the growth will occur in already-booming Yuba City and Sutter Pointe, a housing development on the wide-open southern edge of the county projected to add 40,000 residents. One of the biggest proposals, put forth by Sacramento's Greyrock Development and others, is for the city to annex about 2,300 acres of farmland, enough to build...

The pathogen produces an enterotoxin that acts on the mucosal epithelium lining the small intestine and is responsible for the characteristic massive diarrhoea caused by the disease. In its most severe forms, cholera is one of the most rapidly fatal illnesses known and can cause death in a healthy adult within 24 hours of onset of the disease! Although antibiotics such as tetracycline, ciprofloxacin and azithromycin can reduce the duration and severity of cholera, drug-resistance is being...