Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Bottled vegetables

After I learned a lot about container gardening from Prof. Dr. Willem Van Cotthem in Belgium, my life has changed for a better, because in otherwise useless plastic bottles and plastic bags I can now grow vegetables to produce food for my family, as well as beautify my home with beautiful flowers. At the same time, I am cleaning the environment around my house.

Read more about how Patrick Harry Dimusa has taken to container gardening in Malawi. And speaking of Prof. Dr. Willem Van Cotthem in Belgium, whom God preserve, I wonder what happened to his open-pollinated melon seed scheme? I know I sent some …

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Featured Comment

Kevin Painting on Housekeeping News:

I couldn’t agree more that category clouds are misleading for many reasons, principally because it might be seen as an indication of your editorial policy (viz. what is important rather than what happens to be the issues of the day).

What we should do about Categories and Tags? Do you want to be able to Tag? To create a folksonomy of agrobiodiversity? Leave a comment.

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The Food Crisis: Déjà Vu

It was a year that saw oil prices rise to levels that had never before been imagined. And the world witnessed a decline in world grain production that outlined the the pitfalls of depending on the surplus of a handful of nations for a world food reserve. Nations met to discuss “the food challenge” in the context of a “world of energy shortages, rampant inflation, and a weakening trade and monetary system…”

Nope, not 2008, but 1974. The Lubin Files has links to the speech Henry Kissinger gave to the UN’s World Food Conference.

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Portal on India’s Biodiversity

Agro-ecological zones of IndiaThere’s been a bit of buzz on the intertubes recently about a shiny new portal on India’s biodiversity. At last, it is live, and I have had a preliminary play with it. The first thing to say is that it is very, very slick. The information is well presented and appears quickly. The second thing to say is that while there is definitely some information there about things agricultural, it is a little high level at the moment. But that could easily change. The portal is open source and open to users, so people who really know about farming in India can get in there and make it their own, with reports from the field, performance data, and who knows what else.

I wonder whether it would be possible to give them layers (I believe that’s the technical term) of information about, say, genebank accessions, or predicted climate changes, or crop suitability, or …