nitrogen fixation

• Ag Days Offers Farmers Fancy New Ideas and Gear

For example, the winner of this year's Inventor's Showcase, an event that highlights the efforts of farm shop entrepreneurs, falls into the "make farming easier" category. The winning gizmo was a grain auger designed to work with the hopper-bottomed semi-trailers now used to haul grain. In the old days, grain trucks had a hoist and the grain poured out an opening on the back into a hopper, where it was picked up by an auger and carried into the bin. Nowadays, the grain pours out the bottom of the hopper trailer, so moving that grain trailer in and out of position requires the auger underneath to be pulled back and forth, which is time-consuming and awkward. With the toothpick-thin margins farmers are working with these days, you'd think they'd be jumping all over that idea. But the real...

... farming as a way of producing homegrown nitrogen fertilizer, cutting down on herbicide expenses and... to use legumes for their nitrogen-fixation capabilities if they do not understand the benefit...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• February 04, 2010

• The fungus among us: tiny but ubiquitous, mycorrhizal fungi form vital connections underground.

...We see this in a process called nitrogen-fixation. All plants require nitrogen for growth, ...

• Alternatives Journal
• Vol. 30 Nbr. 5, November 2004

• City Sewage Can Help Grow Farmers' Crops

As in most cities and towns, most of Winnipeg's sewage or wastewater nutrients are not recycled to the agricultural land where those nutrients came from. Even though cities represent many of the largest "confined animal feeding operations" in the world, most of the nitrogen and phosphorus from "human manure" is either released to the atmosphere or discharged into nearby water bodies. Although land application of livestock manure is a good source of recycled nutrients, in contrast to popular perception, the quantity of livestock manure nutrients that is available is relatively small compared to the quantity of nutrients that we export in crop products. Another nutrient source, legume crops and green manures, have the potential to contribute significant quantities of nitrogen for our crop...

... ways to harness the biological nitrogen fixation capacity of legumes in our cropping systems. . How...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• August 26, 2009

• Thank Otto Diesel, Pray for Lithium-Ion Battery

Hence the move among American carmakers to concentrate instead on more familiar stopgap technologies. The current favourite is the "flex- fuel" vehicle that can run on either E85 (85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent gasoline) or straight gasoline. You can see why. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires 7.5 billion U.S. gallons of biofuel be blended into gas by 2012. For many drivers, that something better is cellulosic ethanol -- an alcohol made from straw, leaves, stalks, cane or, best of all, switchgrass, a hardy perennial that grows prolifically almost anywhere. Unlike most other forms of biomass, switchgrass uses the more efficient C4 fixation process to bind carbon dioxide from the air to form its ethanol-producing sugars. Being a perennial, farmers don't have to reseed switchgrass...

... they pay, however, is more soot and nitrogen oxide in the exhaust pipe. A month ago, Mercedes-B...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• August 24, 2009

• The Sixth Extinction

For several million years, a period 100 times greater than the entire known history of Homo Sapiens, the planet's destroyed ecosystems underwent a slow, laborious recovery. The earliest colonizers after the catastrophe were populous species that quickly adapted to degraded environments, the ancient analogues of rats, cockroaches and weeds. But many of the original species that occupied these ecosystems were gone and did not come back. They'll never come back. The extinction of a species, whether in an incinerated 65-million-year-old reef or in a bleached modern-day reef of the Caribbean, is forever. Still, the primary concern here is the future welfare of us and our children. Assuming that we survive the current mass extinction event, won't we do OK? The disappearance of more than a few...

Fixation on global warming detracts attention from species ... of polluting gases such as dangerous nitrogen oxides have levelled off in North America and even...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• August 22, 2009