Nibbles: Impact evaluation reviews, Coffee podcast, Pretty on sustainable intensification, Patient capital, Searching for species names, Searching in general, Palestinian agriculture, Korean Neolithic, Mesquite in Africa, CIMMYT-China, Banana trade, UK plant science, Breadfruit, Weed, Beans in Mexico, Macadamia, Organic Cali

How to do impact evaluation. Required reading.
Podcast on the history of coffee from Linn. Soc. Required listening.
How to intensify agriculture sustainably. Meah.
It may well involve patient capital though.
This thing will look for all the species names in a piece of text or website. Bound to come in useful one of these days.
How to use Google properly. And a vaguely agricultural quiz to see if you’ve been listening in class.
Protecting ancient irrigation system on the West Bank.
And finding the oldest agricultural site in East Asia.
The good and bad side of Prosopis in Africa.
CIMMYT in China.
The banana as a weapon.
Touring UK plant science sites.
Mapping breadfruit to save the world.
“Over 78 million Europeans (15–64 years) have tried cannabis…” Purely medicinal purposes, man.
“We wanted to see how farmers are reacting to this global climate change…” Bean farmers, not cannabis farmers.
If you’re at the Noosa Botanic Gardens, Cooroy, you can see rare macadamias. Yeah but can you smoke ’em?
Organic seed systems in California. No, not cannabis, settle down.

One Reply to “Nibbles: Impact evaluation reviews, Coffee podcast, Pretty on sustainable intensification, Patient capital, Searching for species names, Searching in general, Palestinian agriculture, Korean Neolithic, Mesquite in Africa, CIMMYT-China, Banana trade, UK plant science, Breadfruit, Weed, Beans in Mexico, Macadamia, Organic Cali”

Dave Wood says:

June 28, 2012 at 1:08 pm

“Intensify agriculture sustainably” Meah indeed. Pretty claims: “farmers need to see for themselves that added complexity and increased efforts can result in substantial net benefits to productivity” This seems to be the agroecological myth of complexity is always better.
Lacking access to the recent Nature paper on biodiversity (doi:10.1038/nature11148) I used another recent Cardinale paper (10.3732/ajb.1000364) that shows that diversity – as in polycultures – is not usually a good thing. “There is presently little evidence to support the hypothesis that diverse polycultures out-perform their most efficient or productive species”…and …”
it is almost twice as common for diverse polycultures to produce less biomass than the highest yielding monoculture.”
Pretty also conflates agronomy with agroecology. Agronomy is agronomy and important. Agroecology is bunk and now going belly-up: the IAASTD promotion of agroecology was very heavily for Latin America – 90+% of the total out of 5 regions – and therefore implicitly of little value elsewhere. Which means something went wrong with the IAASTD multi-million dollar process.

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