How Farming Protects the Environment

"An active system of professional regulation is able to influence the protection and the sustainable use of resources found in the environment." This statement is made by Joel Krüger, President of the Federal Council for Engineering and Agronomy (Confea, in Portuguese). And who wins with all this, points out the leader, is the rural sector, which can reap the results of expansion verified each year in Brazilian agribusiness.

The inspection, says Krüger, is one of the strategic tools to have a return of quality in the work performed by agronomy professionals, which are about 120 thousand professionals in Brazil.

"In reality, we need to balance agronomy with the environment. The agronomist engineer works hard on this issue. We need to overcome some debates that lead nowhere on this issue. The current need is a well regulated agronomy. We defend our system of professional regulation," says the president of Confea.

"Krüger says that this defense is necessary, because there are currently some movements for the deregulation of professions. With the current system of regulation, he says, it has been possible to contribute to the growth of agricultural activity in the country.

"We understand that in the areas of engineering, agronomy and geosciences, this regulation is fundamental. Thanks to these agronomists, we have a protected environment, we have a fantastic production in Brazil with high levels of productivity, not only by the sun, not only by the water and land in Brazil, but mainly by the knowledge of the agronomist engineer, since it is his day-to-day technical responsibility in the field that leads to these fascinating results that we have," says Krüger.

Comments

Photovoltaics: Band Diagram

In the previous post we discussed silicon, which is the most used material in photovoltaics. In this post, we introduce the band diagram, for which we will use silicon as an example. We will start our discussion of the band diagram with the Bohr model of the silicon atom. In semiconductor materials the outer shell of the atom, which is called the valence shell, is not completely filled. The outer shell of silicon contains 4 out of the possible 8 electrons, which we call valence electrons. As we discussed in the previous post, each silicon atom in a crystalline structure is bonded to four other silicon atoms. The bonds between the silicon atoms are called covalent bonds. These bonds actually consist of two valence electrons that are shared by two silicon atoms. All valence electrons are fixed in the lattice, forming covalent bonds, and are therefore immobile. However, at a temperature above absolute zero, thermal energy is supplied to these miconductor and some of the vale...

Watching videos on the Internet also harms the environment

Surprisingly, even the videos we watch on the Internet have an impact on the environment. A new report indicates that the internet is one of the top "villains" in the digital sector's carbon footprint, which now accounts for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This share could double by 2025, leaving the digital sector on a par with road transport, as energy consumption in this sector is increasing at the rate of 9% per year. Published by the French research website The Shift Project, the report "Climate Crisis: The Unsustainable Use of Online Video" quantifies the impact of Internet video (VoD, "tubes", pornography, social networks and others) on the environment and the global climate. The study shows that, within all Internet data, online videos account for about 60 percent of the stream, or the largest volume of greenhouse gas emissions in the industry, with about 300 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). Of this total emission,...

Petroleum as Fuel for Fuel Cells (FCs)

Petroleum is made of gaseous, liquid, and solid hydrocarbon-based chemical compounds from sedimentary rock deposits around the planet. Crude petroleum, when refined, provides high-value liquid feeds, solvents, lubricants, and other products. Petroleum-based fuels make up almost one half of the energy supply in the world. Simple distillation is enough to make gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel and kerosene out of petroleum. How much is obtained, in terms of fractions, from the crude oil depends on the origin of the supply. When fuel cells are considered, it is important to understand the physical and combustion characteristics of the fuel, as well as its chemical composition (it is this factor that determines the fuel processing type). Different technologies have to be employed to convert the many fraction types of the petroleum into hydrogen for FCs. A special case is when the fuel is catalytically converted and generates various trace compounds that may be poisonous...

The Environmental Engineering Hub

Search This Blog