Bring farmers to farms

The new era of price rise can be turned into a profitable proposition for the farmer

With help from worms

It came to them as a small business proposal. About 10,000 farmers in the semi-arid Shekhawati region on the edge of Thar desert turned it into a fortune spinner and have become major organic farmers in Rajasthan.

Science and Technology - Briefs

GEOLOGY Earth’s magnetic powers

Scientifically invalid

THREE months after the country’s top science academies released their controversial report backing genetically modified (GM) crops and hastily withdrew it after it was panned by the scientific community, they are back with an updated report—and the verdict is that it is worse than the original.

Letters

AUTONOMY OR CORRUPTION?

Cat coffee

The shiny, greenish-grey beans look no worse off for having passed through the Asian palm civet’s digestive system. “I can’t tell the difference between this coffee and my normal parchment coffee, but connoisseurs say it has a subtle nuttiness,” said septuagenarian coffee planter T S Ganesh, the only producer of this rare coffee in India. He calls it Kari Beck coffee, after the Kannada name for civet. “I can only say that it is very good coffee,” he added with a chuckle.

Science and Technology - Briefs

ARCHAEOLOGY Dino with a horn

Science and Technology - Briefs

TECHNOLOGY Sound, light and gold

India gets ready for banana war

IT’S yellow, sweet, large, uniformly sized and firmly textured. For almost everyone the Cavendish variety is the banana. But it was not so until the 1950s when a fungus knocked out its predecessor, Gros Michel, the sweetest variety known so far. The Cavendish, once a littleknown Vietnamese variety, successfully resisted the virus and became the most widely cultivated and traded banana across the world. But towards early 1990s, a virulent strain of the fungus emerged. Called Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense, it has destroyed Cavendish plantations in major banana exporting countries in Asia, including China, The Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia.

Cracking ammonia

IT IS the prime ingredient of fertilisers that help sustain one-third of the world’s population. Though it is commonly released as a pungent gas from decomposing organic matter, harnessing ammonia from nature requires an intensive industrial procedure.