- Zebra chip is the latest disease to plague the potato industry.
- Urban fruit: An untapped resource.
- Selling English roses. No, the flowers.
Mash-up
There’s an article in the latest Science entitled Celebrating Spuds. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall, so you may not be able to join in the celebrations. But even if you were, I’d suggest settling down with John Reader’s new book Propitious Esculent instead. I fancy myself moderately well informed about the potato but Reader served me with plenty of interesting new tidbits in addition to the usual fare. He has a terrific knack for putting things in context and for managing to take you off on detours so interesting that you hardly notice that you’ve deviated from the straightforward path. The silver mines of South America, for example, may well have been fuelled by potatoes, but the entire social set-up goes well beyond the potato as fuel and illuminates much of the Spanish conquest. Likewise, his very personal reminiscences of life in Ireland in the 1960s help to bring the great famine into perspective. His discussions of various food price crises in history is especially interesting today. When English farmers decided to abandon crops and instead grow sheep for wool, riding a boom in prices, there were riots in the streets over high prices for bread. Sound familiar?
The one thing I didn’t find, and that may be because my memory is playing tricks on me, was a discussion of a mad scheme by a Geoffrey Pyke, a wonderful Englishman who is sadly all but forgotten. After World War II Pyke wrote a series of articles outlining the benefits of using teams of cyclists to haul railway wagons around Europe. He calculated that the energy in food, and the efficiency of human muscle, made this a far better bet than expensive fossil fuels. In my memory, the calculations were all based on feeding the teams of cyclists potatoes. But Wikipedia says it was sugar, and Wikipedia is never wrong. The articles were in the Manchester Guardian of 20, 21 and 24 August 1945. Alas, I can’t find those pages online, so I can’t check. But why would I have remembered potatoes if it really was sugar Pyke was talking about?
Nibbles: Coffee, EU, Homegardens, Cooking, Pollination, Agricultural origins
- “How did the scientists at the National Zoo get involved in the coffee business?“
- Water! The EU Agriculture Commissioner has a blog. Who knew?
- Refugees in Jamaica “eat what they grow.” Thanks, Mary.
- Culinary conservatism. Next up: culinary neo-conservatism. Saints preserve us.
- Texas wild rice bad at sex.
- The hydrological roots of agriculture in Yemen.
Kenya sugar boondoggle blocked, for now.
Via Aguanomics, who noted:
We learn in the update that the sugar company is 20% owned by the Kenyan government. Always nice when your government can sell land to itself to generate cash.
This is going to be a really important decision for the future of Kenya and the future of biofuels everywhere. Can transparency and the rule of law withstand the onslaughts of vested interests?
One country’s response to the threat of climate change
“We want our farmers to grow several crops, not just one crop. We are encouraging our farmers to go into organic farming using shrubs, leaves, herbal pesticide and no chemicals involved so that we can reduce dependency on costly chemical fertilizers. We should improve our yields through applying modern farming techniques such as irrigation and water harvesting technologies. … Farmers are also being taught to alternate rows of crops that complement each other in drawing nutrients from the soil or carbon from the atmosphere. … We must diversify. We must change the methods of farming. We want to change and to achieve our desired goals in increasing household food security, increasing our yields, increasing our production. Productivity is what matters most.
So, where do you suppose all that is happening? Here.