It’s been a little more than a year, and the entries for The First Great Agro.agro.biodiver.se Competition are all in! Time to decide.
Nibbles: Carnival, farmer schools, zero-till, drought, barley, ag college, organic choc, ICTs
- Tangled Bank 101.
- From ELDIS 1: Farmers in Malawi learn best from one another.
- From ELDIS 2: Improving crop-livestock systems in Ethiopia.
- Nature and Science on the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).
- Barley makes a come-back? No, it’s not beer-related, Jeremy.
- A call for respect for Nagpur’s agricultural college in its centenary year. Seconded.
- Internets buzzing this morning. Check out a NatGeo video on how organic cacao is saving the rainforest in the Dominican Republic.
- CTA wants one laptop per farmer. Not just to “make better PowerPoints,” though.
Sorghum to Swaziland; coals to Newcastle?
I’m having a little trouble getting my head round this one. The “Republic of China on Taiwan” funded a successful project to teach Swazi farmers how to grow sorghum in areas with little rainfall. You might have thought that at least a few local farmers would have known how to grow this staple, but apparently all had been forgotten in the rush to cotton and maize. The Swazi Minister of Agriculture also said that education assisted the move away from sorghum:
Sorghum needed someone in the fields to chase away birds and because most children now go to school, maize then became popular.
The farmers who took part in the project were happy enough with the result. I just hope they don’t keep their children away from school to work as scarecrows.
Nibbles: Bees, weird food, wagyu cattle, medieval agriculture, beer
- India to research bees in detail.
- Yak knob to go with your yak milk, sir?
- George Lucas does his bit to conserve a weird cattle breed, the Japanese wagyu. Well, kinda.
- Was the typical English village founded around 900 AD as a result of monastically-driven agricultural innovation?
- Diverse healthy reasons to drink beer; Luigi unavailable for comment.
Nibbles: UG99
- New Scientist magazine rounds up state of play as UG99 races ahead. Article is paywalled, but is available as a press release.