The company is looking instead for project finance to pay for a new urea and ammonia plant, the London-based weekly reported in its latest issue, without saying how it obtained the information. The global credit crunch, triggered in July by defaults on US mortgages, led Qatar Fertiliser s advisers to scrap plans to sell the bond in October because it was getting too expensive to finance the project this way , the magazine said. The credit crisis, which made banks around the world more...

Planted roughly twice as close as trees in conventional groves, they are nurtured by state-of-the-art irrigation and fertilizer systems that allow trees to grow into production faster. FORT PIERCE -- Hurricanes wiped out a quarter of his 100 acres of groves in 2004, and the citrus canker eradication program felled 50 more acres, but Pete Spyke is mounting a cutting-edge comeback in a small experimental grove called ''Rock Bottom. It's a race against greening, a tree-killing disease with no...

Most of the benefits consumers enjoy today are crafted behind the scenes along various points of the seed industry's distribution chain. Following a degree in genetics at University of California, Davis, and further studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, founder Glenn Goldsmith pursued a career in seed production with several companies before he and his wife, Jane, launched Goldsmith Seeds in Gilroy in 1962. Eventually the growers themselves began to attend the trials,...

By: Kathleen Masterson /The Daily Cardinal Nutrients kick off a series of events leading to mutated frogs Fertilizer runoff may be fostering parasite populations and causing an increase in frog deformities, a University of Colorado study published in September suggested. By: Kathleen Masterson /The Daily Cardinal Nutrients kick off a series of events leading to mutated frogs Fertilizer runoff may be fostering parasite populations and causing an increase in frog deformities, a University of...

In the next days and weeks, they will crawl into plants, flowers and shrubs in search of insects whose smell attracts them soft-bodied, leaf-sucking aphids and mites. In this real life story, however, the red-and-black bugs have been unleashed on the 80-acre grounds of one of New York s biggest apartment complexes with a mission: eat pests infesting the neatly landscaped property. Buying the bugs means the complex s owner, Tishman Speyer, can avoid using chemical insecticides. From mesh...