Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
This article introduces an ongoing series that will examine the many lesser-known plants and animals that could benefit humanity … if we work to preserve them.
So far, so uncontroversial. The way people play with the “X food supply from Y species” thing intrigues me, as does the “Z edible species” assertion. These numbers have the ring of the catechism about them. But as a summary to the issues, this series may prove worthwhile.
Back in the 1990s the European Union, concerned about over-production of poor-quality cereals, introduced set-aside. Farmers were required to not grow food on a percentage of their land, currently 8%, and were paid to do so. The result was an increase in biodiversity; wildflowers, insects, birds, that sort of thing. Now, with rising food prices, there’s a proposal to reduce the area of set-aside to 0%, and conservationists are unhappy.
This is an old argument. Grow more food more intensively and you spare some “wild” habitat. I suppose the question is, how long will high food prices last? Until rain returns to Australia? Or until the world wakes up from its ethanol binge?
UC Davis vet explains how bluetongue disease is changing.
A comment on the threat to the Banaue rice terraces prompted me to go Googling, and it seems the story has legs. Unlike the giant earthworms, which may or may not be an all-female species related to a worm called Polypheretima elongata. SciDev.net reports on the efforts of an Indian scientist, Ravindra Joshi, to help the villagers to get rid of the giant earthworms and the rats ((There’s a less informative and slightly garbled version in The Daily Telegraph.)).
To tackle the earthworms, Joshi’s team taught the Ifugao a method of ‘worm farming’ that is popular with small-scale entrepreneurs in the lowlands. The Ifugao collect the worms and rear them in a mixture of soil and old newspapers. They then harvest the worms and process them into feeds used by fish farmers.
Elsewhere in the Philippines people eat worm sausages and burgers, but the Ifugao people who built Banaue have a taboo against soil dwelling creatures. There wasn’t such a taboo against eating rats, so Joshi worked with the locals to develop a community system of rice traps that uses a particularly aromatic rice planted early as a trap crop to lure the rats to their death.
There’s another rodent, though, that eats the giant earthworms. So the villagers have learned to distinguish Rattus tanezumi from Chrotomys whiteheadi, eating the former but releasing the latter to eat the giant earthworms.
The Garden Island News reports on a US$120,000 comprehensive study of coffee agroforestry that has just begun. The point seems to be to quantify the costs and benefits of growing coffee under an upper story of diverse forest trees. The article says that Pacific islanders traditionally grew crops in agroforestry systems, and that many are returning to similar practices. Benefits range from cooler air to fewer pests and diseases to greater resilience, all of which will be investigated.
The study will look at 12 existing shade-grown coffee orchards and compare them with five open-grown coffee orchards based on five key indicators: soil organic matter, major insect pests, yield and bean quality, production costs and market values, and environmental conditions such as shade levels, tree density and plant species present.