AeroFarms is revolutionizing agriculture. It’s on a mission to “combat our global food crisis by leveraging our patented technology and farming locally”.  How? Since 2004, AeroFarms has been operating vertical indoor farms. So what is a vertical farm? As The Good Times reported back in June 2012, “It’s indoor farming, like the concept of greenhouses, but on […]

How can farmers become teachers and villages become classrooms? Quite easily and naturally in Nepal. Because they know the land and environment intimately, local farmers and villagers in eastern Nepal are helping to identify and preserve the country’s immense variety of flora and fauna. Using the local knowledge of the people living there, the non-profit KTK-BELT Project […]

Those of you who know a bit about sailing will appreciate how difficult the Vendée Globe yacht race is. It’s a non-stop race around the world, sailed solo, without assistance, and it takes place every four years. This year’s race began on Sunday 6 November. Over the years, 138 sailors have taken part in the seven […]

“Out of adversity comes empathy”. Out of empathy came the idea and implementation in Japan of an initiative to assist young people who survived the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami that struck the country in March of 2011. That initiative is BEYOND Tomorrow. Begun in June 2011 just after the disaster, this scholarship and leadership programme is […]

Why is it that most high schools don’t teach financial literacy? Most young people who go to school take classes in math or economics, but many don’t know the first thing about how money works in the world, how to earn or make money, or how to manage it. Having recognized this shortcoming, one foundation is promoting financial […]

Mark Pollock is blind and paralysed and testing robotic legs as part of his mission to find a cure for paralysis. He is using his personal experience of a devastating spinal cord injury to spur change around the world. What is Mark’s story? At the age of 22 he became blind. Yet this did not deter him from competing in endurance […]

The continuing civil war in Syria is considered one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time. Estimates indicate that half the country’s pre-war population — more than 11 million people — have been killed or forced to flee their homes. Much emphasis during this crisis has been put on essential rescue efforts in the areas of […]

Few have heard of Dr Jack Preger. That’s probably because he is an inconspicuous, modest person. Yet since leaving farming to become a medical doctor relatively late in life, at the age of 42, he has offered medical treatment free of charge to hundreds of thousands of poor people in Kolkata, India. It all started […]

The farmer and environmentalist Pierre Rabhi promotes agroecology: “sustainable and productive farming practices that empower the most disadvantaged rural communities to achieve food self-sufficiency and economic self-reliance.” According to agroecology.org, this branch of science is: “The application of ecology to the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems. A whole-systems approach to agriculture and food systems development […]

Reading literary fiction is beneficial. It makes people more empathetic, socially perceptive and emotionally intelligent. That’s what a study entitled “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” published in Science, the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, shows. The research also indicates that reading popular fiction or serious non-fiction does not produce the […]