Apologies if you were having a little trouble reaching the site yesterday; so were we. Apparently the server that hosts agro.agro.biodiver.se was under attack from the forces of darkness, but they have now been repelled. We hope we can now resume normal service.
Nibbles: Tangled Bank
- Tangled Bank 109 — a biology blog carnival — is up at Greg Laden’s Blog. There’s livestock!
Sorghum woes in Somaliland
Another farmer speaks:
Worried about the infertility of my farm, the other day, I was sitting alone trying to find explanation as to why my farm was productive in the olden days producing 100 sacks of 50kg each of sorghum in one go and why it is sterile today producing less than 5 sacks a year no matter how hard I may work?
Read the whole lot.
Nibbles: Prices, Info
- Onions, futures, speculation and prices. Weird, and somewhat illuminating.
- New New Agriculturalist, with research, no-till, AGRA and more, much more.
More African silk
A long profile in the Boston Globe of a woman called Catherine Craig. She did field work at Gombe National Park in Tanzania in the 1970s, then became an expert on spider silk, before returning to Gombe a few years ago. The destruction she saw appalled her. So she did something:
In 2003, Craig founded Conservation through Poverty Alleviation International, which took its seemingly simple idea – plant trees, raise larvae, earn income – to Madagascar, a biologically rich Indian Ocean island nation where deforestation is also a problem and which had a tradition of silk production and weaving on which to build.
Which may be good news for Madagascar, but what’s happening in Gombe?