Backgrounders
Backgrounders are brief introductions to important and technical topics and Answers to frequently asked questions share key information on a topic.
Use this information to plan an episode or series of episodes on the topic, to prepare for an interview, or to answer questions from callers.
- All
- Agriculture
- Aquaculture
- Children and youth
- Climate change
- Community development
- Crop production
- Energy
- Environment and climate change
- Gender equality
- Health
- Hygiene and sanitation
- Land issues
- Livestock and beekeeping
- Marketing and market information
- Nature-based Solutions
- Nutrition
- Post-harvest activities
- Social issues
- Soil health
- Trees and agroforestry
- Water management
Make Drylands Productive with Planting Pits
Even if you have dry, desert soils with a hard crust you can improve your land and grow crops again. In parts of West Africa farmers make cracked, hardpan soils productive again by planting their grain seeds in small pits. They plant sorghum and millet this way. Here’s how you can make these planting pits.…
The Rubber-Tire Groundnut Sheller
Groundnuts, or peanuts, are one of the major cash crops in some regions of Thailand and are an important source of protein for rural people. Thousands of Thai farmers work farms of less than one hectare of land, producing groundnuts by manual methods. This is a labour‑intensive process which, along with the low productivity of…
Chickens Fertilize and Weed the Garden
If you have a small farm or market garden you might be interested in a cheap way to fight weeds, fertilize the soil, and increase crop yields. Some people call it a chicken tractor even though it doesn’t have the engine that a normal tractor has. Instead it’s a bottomless cage that you can move…
Prevent Blindness with Vitamin A
If your children are having trouble seeing, you probably want to put something special over their eyes _ a pair of eyeglasses. But for a common kind of vision problem, the kind that starts when a child has trouble seeing in dim light, you should put something special in their stomachs. The special something you…
Garden on Your Rooftop
Are you making the best possible use of the space above your head? I’m talking about the space on top of your house – the rooftop! It’s possible to harvest lots of fresh vegetables from a rooftop garden and deliver them directly to your kitchen table. Go up to your rooftop or out to your…
Grow Vegetable Vines in Small Spaces
Fresh vegetables can be costly to buy at the market. But you can grow them yourself at home. Even if you live in the city or the village and don’t have much space, you can still plant vegetables that grow on vines. A huge variety of these grow in the tropics: cucumbers, gourds, pumpkins, climbing…
What is Happening to the Weather?
Is the weather getting worse where you live? Does the sun seem to burn hotter? Do the rains fail to fall? Some scientists believe what is happening is different from the year-in, year-out changes in the weather that farmers have always had to put up with. And they think pollution from such sources as big…
Use the Sun to Cook your Food
One way people sometimes describe a really hot day is to say, “It’s so hot, you could fry an egg on the ground.” Well, how about cooking vegetables in a box in the sun? You can do this using the rays from the sun. This is called cooking with solar energy. Cooking with solar energy…
Acid Pollution is in the Air
Acid pollution. It’s as horrible as it sounds. It poisons the air we breathe and the rivers and lakes we drink from. It harms the soil we grow our food in and the forests that give us wood. And it also harms us. This is because we are all part of the chain of living…
Cleaning Without Polluting
When we hear about damage to the environment caused by big paper and chemical factories it seems that the causes of pollution are far from us. We think that we are simply victims suffering from these assaults against the environment and our health. However, in one way or another, we all contribute every day to…