Rhizowen summarizes what China’s farmers are doing to their soil:
Farmers of Forty Centuries blow it in a few decades. They’ll be needing a lot more land – somewhere else and soon. Any spare continents going?
Fertilizers: downside seen in China
It really does seem tragic that people need to make their own mistakes, rather than learn from others’. Latest case in point: soils in China are being destroyed by excessive use of fertilizers, which is making the soils too acid to support plant growth. Yields have already dropped 30-50% in some places. The conclusion that profligate and ignorant use of fertilizers comes from a paper published in Science by F.S. Zhang at China Agricultural University in Beijing and colleagues. That is behind a paywall, but there is a report in Nature News.
“They see the green leaves but they don’t see the impact on the soil. If they have a poor crop they think more fertilizer is needed, making matters worse,” Zhang says. Farmers routinely apply double and sometimes triple the necessary amount, he says. Better education could provide a simple solution to the fertilization problem.
People who promote “more fertilizers” as a panacea should consider that they need to deliver more than merely fertilizers.
Nibbles: Farmers’ Rights, Seed Breeder, Genebanks, Pigeon Pea, Cheese
- Farmer? Know your rights.
- If you like long unexpurgated interviews, you like this one with organic breeder John Navazio. h/t Bishop.
- Cropgenebankknowledgebase’s blog seeks feedback. Let ’em have it.
- What is Crop Genebank Knowledge Base? A presentation reveals all.
- ICRISAT set to release three new hybrid pigeon pea varieties.
- “Cheese has an almost limitless variety. Thank goodness.“
Patenting systems good for vegetable diversity
Here’s a turn-up for the books. Our friends at the CAS-IP blog link to a couple of papers that examine the influence of intellectual property rights on vegetable diversity. I’m going to come right out and admit that I haven’t read the papers. But like CAS-IP, I’m intrigued by this quote:
More than 16% of all vegetable varieties that have ever been patented were commercially available in 2004.
Or, to put it another way, less than 84% of all vegetable varieties that have ever been patented were no longer available in 2004.
The primary argument for maintaining crop diversity 1 is based on the need to maintain a safety net of genetic diversity, to have a broad supply of genes available to breeders who can create more productive, weather-hardy, insect resistant, fungus resistant, and better-tasting crops. … If the meaning of diversity is linked to the survival of ancient varieties, then the lessons of the twentieth century are grim. If it refers instead to the multiplicity of present choices available to breeders, then the story is more hopeful.
The crucial part, of course, is how to measure diversity, and how you interpret it. I deliberately snipped out what I consider the money quote from the passage above. Here it is:
We hope our findings stimulate a discussion about the proper measure for that diversity.
Off you go. Discuss away.
Person shows unsolicited interest in agrobiodiversity shock
So there I was, riding the morning train to work, lost in a Ted Talk, as usual. Interesting enough, about diarrhea in India, and how even though rehydration therapy is saving hundreds of thousands of lives, babies are still dying. Then he overlays his slide of a bridge to nowhere with a bunch of words, to make the point that he isn’t talking only about diarrhea, that the problem lies in “the last mile,” getting women actually to use the cheap, available rehydration salts. That sort of problem is common to many areas, and it is nothing to do with poverty, or lack of education. On any given day, 25% of the diabetics in North America are not using their insulin properly. And blow me if, at around 4’40” in, he doesn’t say this:
It’s not just medicine. Here’s another example from technology: agriculture. We think there’s a food problem, so we create new seeds. We think there’s an income problem, so we create new ways of farming that increase income. Well, look at some old ways, some ways that we’d already cracked: intercropping. Intercropping really increases income. Sometimes in rice we found incredible increases in yield when you mix different varieties of rice side by side. Some people are doing that. Many people are not. What’s going on?
Wow! Here’s a guy who gets it. What I found so interesting is that for the rest of his talk Sendhil Mullainathan focused on ways to help individuals to overcome their cognitive and psychological biases and do the right thing, even though at some level they don’t believe it is the right thing. It’s the whole idea of nudging people to change their behaviour. What I found particularly intriguing about the agricultural example is that it isn’t the farmers who need nudging. It’s the people who allocate research funds, and who run (or more likely shut down) extension services, and who deliver what they think poor farmers need or want.
These are the people who need to be nudged. I just wish I knew how. If you’re rich and educated, you can eat the diverse diets that offer better health. But you can also deny that option to poor people. You can invest in a hedge fund, but you can also promote an agricultural system that permits no hedging. What’s going on?
I know there are times when we sound like a cracked record 2 when we bang on about the disconnect between agriculture and conservation, or the more general lack of awareness of the importance of agrobiodiversity. But this made such a nice change. So, not that you need it, thank you Sendhil Mullainathan.