Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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When urban agriculture goes wrong

Bits of the interwebs are all aflutter over a report claiming that “Hundreds of unwanted backyard chickens are ending up at animal shelters“.

One commentator, whom I respect, said:

The headline is wrong. It isn’t hundreds, it’s thousands of chickens.

This is one of the things that irritates me about these so-called ‘urban farmers’. A lot of them have no idea what they’re getting into, and aren’t prepared to deal with the consequences. They don’t know how to properly care for them, don’t understand their health needs, don’t understand what chickens eat, and as soon as the chicken becomes inconvenient, get rid of it.

That’s a bit sweeping for my taste, but I do know where he’s coming from. I also smell the enticing aroma of a slow-simmered business opportunity.

I am quite sure the urban “farmers” would pay — maybe only 50 cents, but still — for someone to remove those birds. You could show up in a chickenshit neighbourhood once a month or so in a big old van to collect the birds and a small “handling fee”. Take the birds back to base, slaughter them and use them to prepare fine chicken stock, then sell the stock back to the people who sold you the chickens.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Plant breeding as a public good. Again.

Back in February 2012 we were happy to spread the word about the first Student Organic Seed Symposium, in Vermont in the US. We heard no more about it, of course. ((And let me use this opportunity to say that we will always consider guest posts on topics of interest.)) Such is our institutional memory, however, that an official report on the meeting, in a proper journal no less, caught our eye and demanded to be shared.

It’s an interesting read, and full of hope. There is clearly a demand for breeding to meet the needs of not just organic but other sorts of what might be called “proper” farming. ((The other sort is well supplied already.)) And there are young professionals who want to meet those demands. The tricky part is how to make it pay. From the brief details in the report, it seems that US government funding and private philanthropy are helping to train breeders and support specific breeding programmes, a return to plant breeding as a public good. Will that be enough?

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Nibbles: Fishing, Food systems, Monitoring, Farmers’ rights book, Indian veggies

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Varieties of climate change

Something is up, no doubt about it. First off, PBS in the US has a longish news report on how farmers in India “find promise in ancient seeds”.

Watch Struggling Farmers in India Find Promise in Ancient Seeds on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Strangely, although the farmers are able to find promise in ancient seeds, the report claims that seeds stored at IRRI in the 1960s are too ancient to be viable. Not sure how that works.

One of the protagonists of the PBS video, Debal Deb, crops up again in another video that came to light on the PAR website. According to PAR: “This film follows the construction of a new seed bank premises in Odisha, a venture that provides a potent symbol of Debal’s values”.

With the zeitgeist firmly embracing the idea of agricultural biodiversity, preferably ancient agricultural biodiversity, as a suitable response to climate change, it is good to be reminded that droughts are diverse too. David Lobell looks at two recent scientific papers on drought tolerance. One shows very little difference between specifically “drought-tolerant” maize varieties and other varieties without the drought-tolerance genes.

To me, there are a couple of possible ways to interpret this. One is that the newer varieties being marketed by companies are not really much better in general. Or these results might indicate that the types of droughts the newer varieties were designed for are somehow different than the type of droughts they were exposed to in this experiment. In particular, as we’ve discussed in prior posts, 2012 was a drought characterized by very high temperatures and vapor pressure deficits, the kind of droughts that one expects more of with climate change.

2012, in other words, was not just a dry drought but a hot drought. The other study David looks at compares the two kinds of drought.

What’s really interesting is how remarkably low the correlation between performance in “drought” and “drought+heat” is (0.08).

While not reading too much into either study, Lobell cautions that very hot droughts may require different kinds of varieties from mere dry droughts.

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Nibbles: Public goods, Again, Tainted love, Strawberry Fare, Organic money, Organic unbuttered parsnips, Insect resistance, Cassava quakes, Gin and other botanics