This article is aimed at farmers who are amongst the more than 8,000 registered
readers of our weekly electronic Healthy Living articles. I want to recommend
here a North American site to these farmers; it is www.attra.com specialized
in sustainable agriculture. This site can help famers, researchers, students
and anybody interested or related to sustainable livestock or farming. The ATTRA
name comes from “Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas”.
They publish research results by proven competent institutions and individual
researchers in different areas such as organic agriculture, horticulture, soil,
integrated control of plagues, cattle, energy at farms and other specialists
in sustainable farming. This team is managed by the National Centre for Appropriate
Technology and financed by the USA’s Department of Agriculture.
They have wide coverage for horticulture for varied types such as brassicas
like cabbage, kale and others, potatoes, green corn, leafy vegetables, tomatoes,
pumpkin, leeks, vegetables, leguminous and many more. The site houses a big
section for the agriculture of soy beans, beans, cotton, corn and many more
where they always give a summary in HTML or PDF. For soy bean blight, for example,
they have articles showing alternatives for controlling it. Not all the articles
and recommendations are organic, this is why if one has an organic certificate
one must check to see if the recommended products fall within the acceptance
of the organization that issues the certificate. For example to look for alternative
solutions for ‘aphis’ one must place this name in goggle’s
search engine to find the available alternatives. Better still use this term
in the ATTRA’s search engine where there will be more than 87 articles
on the subject. For those that do not speak English it is advisable that they
familiarize themselves with the language as there is a vast array of articles
from all over the world. I personally benefitted and improved my English after
a two year stay in Canada and this has increased my learning power considerably.
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