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Innovative technologies for organic farming

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• TEDCred score: +2.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +3

  A comment on Talk: Melinda Gates: Let's put birth control back on the agenda

  May 20 2012: This is brilliant, because it gives an overview of the history of birth control. It's particularly not ethnocentric since it shows how regardless of ethnicity all women have the same ambition, to parent well, which means parenting fewer children.
  
  Melinda Gates has a lot of soul, I have a new-found respect for her and her husband's social work.

• A comment on Talk: José Bowen: Beethoven the businessman

  May 16 2012: nice! Especially the point about schools. Khan academy is already turning basic education into a freeware, and here's there TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

• A comment on Talk: Amory Lovins: A 40-year plan for energy

  May 3 2012: Great talk, I wish I was working at your institute! I think part of efficient energy use is turning organic waste to an odourless organic fertilizer, to new food, and all on site. By on site I mean in or near the kitchen where it was generated, inside a condo, an apartment, house or institution. The technology to make it effortless (and side-effect-free) to turn waste to fertilizer is emerging (urbanfarmsorganic.com). The micro edible gardens that benefit from this fertilizer would be inside the apartment, on its walls, suspended from its ceiling, or on a balcony or rooftop for seasonal gardens. Here's a review of innovative technologies that could make urban / organic farming a convenient choice in the future: page 21 of http://innovative-science.com/our-science-magazine . If cities recycled some fo their waste to green space and edible plants, on site, they would spend less energy on exporting and processing waste, and on importing food. They would also have a softer, greener urban landscape which improves life standard in the city. This on site process of waste into new food also means people will eat well regardless of their income level. I wonder if urban agriculture will become another focus of RMI, along with electricity, transportation, building and industry.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Jonathan Foley: The other inconvenient truth

  Apr 11 2012: In a study by Mader et al, published in Science in 2001, it was demonstrated that organic agriculture is more resource-efficient than conventional agriculture: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/296/5573/1694.abstract
  Organic matter retains water for a longer time, which makes farms consume less water and be drought resilient. Synthetic fertilizer on the other hand kill soil microbes by osmotic drought. These microbes, in a soil high in organic matter, exude carbs (sticky solution) that binds soil aggregates together. This means more soil structure, more pores in the soil, more places to store air in the soil, and more oxygen for the plants. Aerated roots produce higher yields, this is why adding organic matter to the soil a conventional farm boosts plant yield, it's not just the nutrient effect. More details are found in Mader's paper.
  Also there are many misconceptions about organic meaning "rustic". I moderated a technical session for 3 years at the American Society for Agricultural and Biological Engineers, on innovative technologies for organic farming. I then presented a review of such technologies at conferences, and in this pop sci article: Page 21 at http://innovative-science.com/our-science-magazine
  Technology like weeding robots, software for modeling nutrient mineralization from organic fertilizer, and other advances are expected to make organic farming a low-labor, high-return type of business, not to mention that it will afford you a conscience as well.

• A comment on Talk: Mark Raymond: Victims of the city

  Mar 23 2012: Thank you Mark, the solutions you mention really echo with someone fron Beirut like myself. I think what escapes westerners is that in most of the world, we as people didn't have enough control over how our cities sprawled in the past, and we need to remedy that now.

• A comment on Talk: T. Boone Pickens: Let's transform energy -- with natural gas

  Mar 22 2012: The "ennemy", the Saudi regime, and you, the US have worked together to prop banana republics in the middle east and colonize it. The divide is not between OPEC and the US, but between aggressive colonizers; Saudi regimes, their US allies, and Europeans, vs. .natives of the "ex-colonies", everywhere. We the ex-colonies want to reach our potential, and you and your "ennemy" need to move out of our way, and stop supporting corrupt regimes so you can better exploit us. Moubarak, Ben Ali, Hariri's suit indicted for embezzlement in Lebanon... You supported these until the last possible minute. By all means, end the age of oil from the so-called ennemy (which you're allied with!!), so we can be free of your colonial policies and we can have our own technological renaissance.

• A comment on Talk: Paul Gilding: The Earth is full

  Mar 4 2012: This is a great eye opening talk, but we in the middle east can't way to be done with power mongering, US-backed oil babies! This is when we will fulfill our potential as a well educated and hard working population.
  
  The economy crunch is already just starting to make it harder for the Saudi dictatorship to support its Banana Republics in the middle east, these collapsed in Tunis, Egypt and one is half out of power in Lebanon, thank God! Provoking civil wars is getting hard with less Saudi cash as well, not that they haven't tried, as described by Seymour Hersh in this famous 2007 New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh
  
  While the world at large benefited from oil, we mostly suffered from a little too much "interest" in our area, and some divide and conquer strategies by oil importers, to keep oil accessible.

• A comment on Talk: Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate

  Mar 4 2012: This is amazing! I would love to work with such a lab on a swarm of hovering robots that neutralize weeds in organic farms and gardens. My new business develops technologies for organic and urban farms. Weeding is a bottle neck in organic production, where herbicides and their health hazards are avoided. It's been long discussed (academic publications) that weeding robots will help make organic farming particularly affordable. I summarized existing innovative technologies for organic farming in an Innovative Science article, p. 21of http://innovative-science.com/our-science-magazine .
  
  I can imagine how many applications these robots can have, sweeping anti-personal mines, carrying cell phones to hover and take group pictures...!
• +2

  A reply on Talk: Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future

  Mar 4 2012: I agree with Max. Innovations don't come from corporations in any case. The famously "disruptive" technology come from the small technology start ups that corporations dread, because they shake up the status quo. Social media is now connecting inventors and idealists from around the world, and making it easier for them to challenge the status quo. Business with social purposes, DIY culture, groups like Open Source Ecology (http://opensourceecology.org) are changing the world, not corporations.
• +2

  A comment on Talk: Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future

  Mar 4 2012: great point about upcoming technology, but the rising billions will do more than consume, they will invent, and have already stated inventing their own technology. Benefit to the decolonizing world (which you call developing) rarely comes from the sales of a global corporation, it comes from local ingenuity and local technological renaissances. I call it decolonizing world because colonization kept on going through loopholes after it became illegal in the mid 40's. When the Saudi regime, backed by the US props Banana Republics all over the middle east, and uses its extremists to try to provoke strife and weaken the "natives" (us!), that's an indirect form of colonization. Also when western news censors the positive about the decolonizing world, that's a way of negating the truth about the "natives", an excuse to stay prejudice against them and support corrupt regimes in their country. It's not just old news editorial reflexes.
  As advocates of the Arabic Spring have said, what's going on is decolonization part 2, and it's unsurprisingly accompanied by a rise of environmentalism, civic spirit and feminism in the middle east. In China, a national goal was set for their country to become a leader in solar technology. In India Vandana Shiva denounces the false claims of imported corporate products like long term fertility of soils resistance to drought. She gives her country the freedom to create a sustainable agriculture, and not be exploited consumers. That's why I would agree that inventions are on the way from the entire word, and not just the west, and for this reason there is hope.