Rock Dust and Pest Control
Among organic methods of pest control, rock dust is one of the safest for people, soil, and plants.
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RTE’s Coordinator Jorge Villaseñor Garibi Researches and Promotes The Use of Rock Dust Throughout Mexico
“The biggest challenge in teaching about the use of rock dust is breaking the paradigm of a sixty year-long tradition of using chemical fertilizers,” said Jorge Villaseñor Garibi in a recent interview for Remineralize the Earth (RTE) that explored his experiences with training Mexican farmers in the use of rock dust.
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Perfect nutrient dense blueberries integrating compost teas, minerals and biological soil management
Organic Connections magazine has published a story on blueberry grower Bob Wilt who found that the more efficiently he was able to get minerals into his berries, the higher the brix measurement went. Hence, he concentrated on doing that and still does to this day. And as the brix has gone up, so has the flavor.
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Delving into nutrient density
In the middle of the fertile Willamette Valley in western Oregon, farmer Bob Wilt walks the rows of his 75-acre organic blueberry farm critically plucking ripe fruit for analysis. What he’s looking for is not sweetness or pest resistance (though these factors are certainly involved), but the fruit’s nutrient density. Thus far, his berries measure up. Test.
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Teaching children how to remineralize trees in Mexico
On June 4, RTE Mexico coordinator Jorge Vilaseñor recently gave an educational workshop to children in Zapopan, Jalisco and Mexico.
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CETEM sponsors Agrominerals for Biofuels
CETEM, the mineral industry association in Brazil, is following up on another symposium on March 12th in Rio de Janeiro with workshops on agrominerals for biofuels.
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RTE partners with Trees for Clean Energy Network in Kenya
Trees for Clean Energy Network (TCEN) empowers youth and women to produce clean energy biofuel to light households and power small enterprises. Joanna Campe, Executive Director of RTE, and Zablon Wagalla met each other at the World International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC 2008) vowing to partner at some time in the future growing jatropha on marginal soils with rock dust. Jatropha produces sustainable biofuel from the seeds at the same time that it restores soils and makes them arable within a few years. TCEN has started a fundraising drive to raise $6500 for a ...
Farmer Campaigns for Nutrient Dense Food Production
Beginning in the 1950s, America’s farmers were told to get big, or get out. It wasn’t just a slogan, it was USDA policy, a mantra recited by several secretaries of agriculture. That mindset, combined with a post-WWII explosion in chemical fertilizer use, made our farms larger and more productive than ever — but at a high price, with many small farmers vanishing and the introduction of new kinds of environmental challenges.
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CETEM Conference in Rio de Janeiro
On November 27, a conference on rocks and alternative minerals to fertilize soils and use as biofuel was held at the Center of Mineral Technology (CETEM) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. RTE Coordinator in Brazil, Alberto Machado and Carlos Cristan, attended the event, where geologists, agronomists, veterinaries, biologists, farmers, entrepreneurs and government officials had the opportunity to discuss proposals for public policies for the support and feasibility of the remineralization of Brazilian soils.
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John Todd – Ecology From 40,000 Feet
“When we’re flying at 40,000 feet and we look down, we see a marvelous amount of innovation in agriculture, environmental restoration, green architecture, in systems design and in renewable energy development,” Dr. John Todd tells Organic Connections. “The news on the ground has never been richer, more diverse or in some respects more global. There probably isn’t a continent on which we don’t have something happening, and that just wasn’t the case 20 years ago.”
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