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agriculture

THE NITROGEN BOMB

Submitted by jdp on Sun, 07/02/2017 - 01:28 pm

I just finished reading Paul Bogard's The Ground Beneath Us, (I recommend it), which among other things warns us yet again about the serious issues--environmental, economic, public health, food security--associated with over-reliance on chemical and fossil-fuel intensive industrial agriculture. It's a good 40-years-later follow-up to Wendell Berry's classic Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Sierra Club Books, 1977).

It also reminded me of a much more technical and difficult book I read a few years back, Jozef Visser's Down to Earth, subtitled "A Historical and Sociological Analysis of the Rise of 'Industrial' Agriculture and the Prospects for the Re-rooting of Agriculture in the Local Farmer and Ecology. Visser, who has graduate degrees in chemistry and a long career in agricultural chemistry, returned to graduate school later in life to produce this book, which is his dissertation from the University of Waginengen (Netherlands). A pdf is available free at the link above, and I recommend it.

STAR Offers Undergrads Paid Internships in Research Labs - University of Kentucky

Thanks to a new NIAAA grant, undergraduate students interested in the STEM fields will have the opportunity to earn a paid summer internship with faculty researching alcohol abuse. The program will reach out specifically to a diverse group of Kentucky students for this unique educational experience. Psychology Professor Mark Prendergast and Kim Nixon, associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences oversee the program.

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