Category: VOA Agriculture Report

Advice on how much fertilizer to use will soon be just a phone call away for rice farmers in the Philippines. The Philippine Department of Agriculture and the International Rice Research Institute plan to launch a free service in September. Farmers will call a number and a recorded voice will ask them simple questions in …

When is a plant considered a weed? Experts at Penn State University have a simple answer: When the undesirable qualities outweigh the good qualities.Consider that crops generally produce several hundred seeds from each plant. By comparison, each weed plant can produce tens or even hundreds of thousands of seeds. And some buried seeds can survive …

One of the great American success stories after World War Two was the rise of industrial farming. But now small is big. People who say they worry about their food and their environment are looking for locally grown produce from small farms.Local meat producers want a piece of the action. But small farmers often have …

When farmers and wild animals share land, conflicts can be hard to prevent. But the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is trying to help. The FAO and other groups are developing what they call the Human-Wildlife Conflict Mitigation Toolkit. This toolkit is a collection of advice and information that farmers in southern Africa have …