Hopefully producers won’t have to irrigate as much this year as they did in 2012, but I’d like you to consider joining a program that can not only improve your irrigation efficiency, but reduce nutrient loss and save you money!  I’ve been in Extension for nearly eight years and a program I’ve been involved with that has been a very rewarding program and made a positive impact for many is the Nebraska Agricultural Water Management Network, or NAWMN. My colleague, Gary Zoubek tracks the evaluation results and shared that in 2005 only a few producers in the Upper Big Blue NRD, (shortly followed by the Little Blue NRD) were participating, but this program has now grown to over 800 producers across the state and I’m sure we’ll add another 100 or 200 more this season!

A couple of the tools we use are ETgages® or Atmometers which mimic crop…

Will this year match last summer’s record-low sea ice extent? Only time will tell

By Summit Voice

FRISCO — Since reaching its maximum extent in mid-March, Arctic sea ice has closely tracked the 2012 extent, which ended up at an all-time record low for the satellite era, going back to 1979.

In an early June update, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that May’s average daily decline was about 14,100 square miles per day, slower than the 1979 to 2000 average of  17,000 square miles per day.

Overall, the May extent was the 10th-lowest during the satellite observation era, and about 151,000 square miles above the record low of 4.95 million square miles, set in 2011.

FromThe Denver Post (Colleen O’Connor):

Dirt is almost all that people can talk about these days in communities along U.S. 50 and 287. Photos of fierce dust storms rolling across the state’s Eastern Plains are showing up on Facebook and local TV news, harking to the Dust Bowl years that devastated southeastern Colorado in the 1930s. Farmers and ranchers are tolling their losses. People are praying for rain. It’s the inevitable result of three seasons of extreme drought in the area — D4 this year, the worst on the U.S. Drought Monitor scale, and no relief in sight, said state climatologist Nolan Doesken. “The first year, it was very dry, but there was still reasonable vegetative cover,” he said. “That started deteriorating last year, with more and more bare ground.”

For miles on either side of U.S. 287 between Kit Carson and Lamar, the earth is brown and bare…

… setting a record.

One of the Planning Commission of India’s working groups of agriculture concerns ‘crop husbandry, agricultural inputs, demand and supply projections and agricultural statistics for the Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-17)’ which is a lot to expect out of a single committee, howsoever eminent the members and however luminous their output.

Perhaps that is why their observations especially where the use of (and supply of) energy for farming are so, shall we say, unconventional. The equation is that one (cultivating, farm labouring, roti-eating) human’s output is 0.05 kW, a draught animal (cow or bullock) is worth 0.38 kW, a power tiller delivers 5.6 kW and a tractor rules our districts with a lordly 26.1 kW. [You can get the extraordinary numbers here, in this excel file.]

In a short chapter on energy use in Indian farms, the committee has said: “While developed world mechanised its agriculture to create…

Every few months, Hollywood is making yet another push for stronger copyright laws and more restrictive trade agreements. First, there were SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, and now there is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). But new data from Ericsson’s (s ERIC) ConsumerLab research unit shows that Hollywood may have gotten it all backwards. The most successful weapon in the fight against piracy aren’t new laws, but better services.

Case in point: Less than 15 percent of U.S.-based online video viewers use file sharing for their movies and TV show fix, according to Ericsson’s TV & Video Consumer Trend Report 2012 (PDF). Netflix (s NFLX) on the other hand is used by around 55 percent. Hulu, websites of TV networks, iTunes (s AAPL) and Amazon’s (s AMZN) VOD offering are also more popular than piracy.

Compare that to Spain, where legal services are still in their infancy: Spanish online…

There are many programs going on trying to lure more girls into studying engineering and physics (some good, some bad), which seems, at first sight, great; but sometimes I wonder. Shouldn’t we first make sure that the women who are already in the system get some support so that they actually want to continue their career? Shouldn’t we first fix the infamous ‘leaky pipeline‘ before just putting more women into it and exposing them to the problems that makes women leave science at a far greater rate than men?

Annoyingly, often the character and preferences of women are blamed for the leak in the pipeline: the infamous imposter syndrome, that women are more prone to be insecure about their qualifications, longing for stability in life, and simply more aware that there are other more important things in life than the career, like having children, and…