Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Reading The great Vitamin A fiasco, by Professor Michael Latham of Cornell University, I had to force myself not to punch the air and shout “Yes!”. More than once. Mainly because he provides the backstory and the supporting evidence that makes sense of a deep-seated feeling I’ve long had, that food has been sidelined as …
Continue reading “Blind about how to fix vitamin A deficiency”
What with high beta carotene sweet potatoes on one side and maize on the other, there will soon be no excuse for anyone in Africa to have vitamin A deficiency. We’ve blogged about this before. Often. The question remains: is it better to push these orange varieties of the staples, or promote diverse diets? Or, …
Continue reading “Tackling vitamin A deficiency in Africa one crop at the time”
Google has a new thing where you put in a search term and it tells you what other terms showed a similar pattern of search over time since 2004, at least in the US. So of course I played around with it for way too long, but pretty much nothing of interest turned up. Except …
Continue reading “Causation sought between seed banks and vitamin D deficiency”
Agricultural landscapes and biodiversity in China. Traditional farming practices good for biodiversity, modern bad. Therefore need intensification, to take pressure off natural habitats. But no, wait, that usually means monocultures and chemicals, which are bad. Oh crap. No mention of genebanks. Innovation in input supply systems in smallholder agroforestry: seed sources, supply chains and support …
Michael Specter is a staff writer for The New Yorker, has a book out called Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, and gave a recent TedTalk on The danger of science denial that has created quite a stir, most of it positive. And I’m mostly in accord. …
Continue reading “Vaccines, vitamins and er .. lemme see .. vital information!”