- Straws in the wind or portent of change? Why Farmers Are Embracing Social Media: the #AgChat Story
- Straws in the wind or portent of change? AGree (geddit?) Transforming Food and Ag Policy. See also Marion Nestle’s commentary and comments therein.
- More on the medicinal trees genebank in Nairobi.
- And just look at the new website of the International Potato Center genebank. Part of a complete makeover.
Sunday delight: pollinators take flight
Spend a few minutes watching this wonderful Ted Talk by Louie Schwartzberg, a film-maker with a thing for time-lapse flowers and slo-mo birds, butterflies, bluebottles, bees, and bats.
German agricultural biodiversity illustrated
I rather liked these depictions of agrobiodiversity from the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV).
You say diversity
From the way she’s linking it to health in this snippet from her speech at FAO today, I suspect Hillary meant crop diversification when she talked about the work on “crop diversity” being done by Feed the Future. I wonder if anyone will be able to point out to her that there’s another, often overlooked, dimension to the diversity in farmers’ fields, which underpins the other, very sensible stuff she said about the need for improved varieties.
H.R. Clinton favours increased crop diversity shock
This just in from our colleague with the FAO building pass. (Photo hacked from IFAD’s Facebook page.
Just went and heard Hillary at FAO. She was brilliant and spoke very sensibly about food security.
She said we need higher quality seeds (more nutritious, more drought tolerant and disease resistant), we need to connect farmers to local markets and local markets to global markets. She also said we need to increase crop diversity!!
Hopefully the full transcript will be available on the FAO website at some point – she spoke very quickly!
She ended by saying that in spite of all the current headlines, she keeps her eye on the ‘trendlines’ and that we need to make advancing food security a cause for our time and deal with it now, or else we may never catch up.
LATER: Here’s the audio.