The best way for a regional government to reduce food waste is to set goals. Previous and common efforts focus on messaging and even in increasing the cost of managing food waste for households. New research shows that simply setting food waste reduction goals is enough and even better than
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IN-SIGHTS: Gifts from the oven
Published five years ago at my idled website Notable Discoveries. With a few updates, it is here for a change of pace after too much negative news. Long ago mother baked regularly, but I envied our neighbours’ store-bought white bread. It had a thin soft crust and gumminess perfect for
Continue readingThings Are Good: Kenyan Farm Foments Fossil Free Fertilizer
Yes, fertilizers exist that don’t make use of fossil fuels; however, the use of petoreluaem based fertilizers have become a mainstay of modern industrial agriculture. This use of fossil fuels for fertilizer has led to the agriculture sector’s carbon footprint being as large as it is. The transportation of the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Experimental Rice in Bali Increases Yields & Decreases Emissions
You love rice, everyone loves rice and we need more of it. Growing populations and the impact of the climate crisis on crops raises the stakes of rice cultivation. As a species we need to keep rice cheap, plentiful, and accessible to ensure a stable global food supply. India has
Continue readingThings Are Good: Better Solar Helps Bitter Hops
Agrivoltaic setups aren’t new to regular readers of this site as we’ve seen many times that certain crops benefit from the shade solar panels provide; and, the solar panels benefit the farmers by producing clean energy. Now we know that hops, which flavour beer, thrive under solar panels. A German
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: What did Canada’s recent federal budget do for housing and homelessness?
I’ve written a blog post about what Canada’s recent federal budget did for housing and homelessness (which wasn’t very much). Here’s my analysis: https://nickfalvo.ca/canadas-2023-federal-budget/
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Mammoth Ideas For Past, Present, and Future – Sweetish Meatballs
Bread, beef and milk will be artificially produced pic.twitter.com/4AYs2kHe3N — Paul Fairie (@paulisci) March 27, 2023 Not now, meatball created from long exti wait what? pic.twitter.com/gXbcHg4aGU — tern (@1goodtern) March 28, 2023 They took extinct mammoth DNA, repaired it with elephant DNA, used sheep stem cells for replication, and created
Continue readingThings Are Good: Prairie Strips Save Farms
Prairie strips are a farm conservation practice that requires minimal intervention and delivers huge benefits By converting 10% of cropland to native prairie, farmers can reduce soil loss by 95%, total phosphorous loss by 90%, and total nitrogen loss by 85% A quick summary: pic.twitter.com/rfD7PHmuxy — Sam Knowlton (@samdknowlton) March
Continue readingThings Are Good: Start a Small Garden This Spring
Anyone can be a gardener and you can too! All you need is a balcony or small plot of land and you can start growing your own food. To some people, the very idea of caring for other living things can be scary – what if all the plants die?
Continue readingThings Are Good: Catching Illegal Fishers
Many people reduce their meat intake (which is good!) by swapping it with another animal protein source of fish. The problem here lies in how fishing is done around the world and the crimes committed by too many fishers. Indeed, crime on the high seas is alive and well with
Continue readingThings Are Good: Lentils Instead of Meat Saves Money, Health Costs, and the Planet
Lentils (and other pulses) are a fantastic way to save money, but did you know it’s good for your health and the planet? Researchers have concluded that if people who currently eat meat cut out just red meat it can make a big, positive, difference in their lives and communities.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Low Intensity Farming Gets High Results
Everybody knows that factory farming isn’t a sustainable use of land, but it’s still be practised because people think it’s more efficient. It turns out that low intensity farming produces some stellar results too. Researchers looking into cattle on farms found many benefits from a low intensity approach. Indeed, by
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Future of Food is Algae
In the coming years we’ll be eating more algae if we’re lucky. Amazing algae already accounts for biofuel production and can be used to make bioplastics too, so why not keep looking for other ways to use it? At Cornell, that’s exactly what some researchers did. They discovered that coastal
Continue readingThings Are Good: Farm Fields of Solar Produce Bonuses
In the UK the average person wants to get off fossil fuels, but the Conservatives in power want the opposite. Obviously this is not good, and it gets worse: the new PM Liz Truss wants to ban solar panels on farms, Conservatives clearly don’t understand how the world works. The
Continue readingThings Are Good: Save the Grocery Store, Save the Town
When markets fail people, then the people need to replace the market. Ir, to put it more directly: when a profitable grocery store isn’t profitable enough for a company then small towns need to buy that grocery store and turn it into a publicly owned asset which keeps the community
Continue readingExcited Delirium: Prices, Inflation and Greed & How to Use Abandoned Malls
Just another day of price hikes and shoulder shrugs for monopolies in Canada … The post Prices, Inflation and Greed & How to Use Abandoned Malls first appeared on Excited Delirium.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Plastic-Free Cucumbers Hit the Shelves in Canada
Canadians love putting food in petroleum products so much that we ship cucumbers and milk in plastic (yes, you can buy milk in plastic sacks). Thankfully, Canadians are starting to understand that plastic wrapping is wasteful and really bad for the environment. An agricultural company in Ontario has created a
Continue readingThings Are Good: Save Forests by Removing Just One Item From Your Diet
We are what we eat, and right now many of us need to change who we are. Changing one’s diet can be one of the biggest things one does for the environment since we must eat everyday. Researchers have yet again shown that just removing red meat from your diet
Continue readingThings Are Good: Better Beer by Biological Betterment
Barley, like many other plants, faces worse growing conditions thanks to the ongoing climate crisis. Also like other plants, researchers are looking into ways to help the plant survive unpredictable weather changes. Biologists in Japan have modified the barley plant to survive early flooding which will help farmers get a
Continue readingThings Are Good: Growing Coffee Sustainably in Finland
Climate change changes everything and coffee is no exception. Traditional growing locales are suffering from unpredictable weather and more incidences of extreme weather making it difficult for the coffee plants to survive. A Finnish company has been researching how to grow coffee in a a lab so that coffee plants
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