Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Decentralized biofuel distillation

A report in The Financial Express of India makes perplexing reading. It cites a report from CIAT, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, that advocates small-scale conversion of starchy crops such as sweet potato and cassava into ethanol for use as biofuel. Initial processing would be a village-level activity, resulting in 50% alcohol (by volume). This would be transported to a central distillery to make 99.5% alcohol. I see a couple of problems.

First, experience in, for example, the Kolli Hills of India shows that when poor rural farmers grow industrial feedstock (cassava for starch factories) they do not earn enough the replace the nutrition they used to grow and that is now displaced by the industrial crop.

Secondly, drunkeness. I’m serious. I’ve lost track of the number of diversification and income-generating projects in which the women have to be in charge because if the men get their hands on the additional cash they spend it on drink. So, let’s cut out the middle man and make drink the object of the exercise?

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Mapping

As Luigi pointed out, we have a new facility here: mapping. Our idea is to add more value to the posts, by making it easy to see where on Earth they relate to. And by the same token, you can click on the Map page and see all the geo-referenced posts. ((For some reason that I have not been able to figure out, the map is centred on Nigeria, which was the very first post I tagged. At least, it is here. But you can zoom out and drag the map around to find the region you are interested in, so I’m not too bothered.))

We won’t be tagging the little Nibbles, and we aren’t too sure how we are going to cope with single stories that refer to lots of places. Maybe tag just one, maybe think of something else. But for now we think this is, as the young people say, wicked cool, and we hope you find it useful.

As to how I did it, I didn’t have to do very much. The blogging software we use, WordPress, has brilliant people writing plug-ins that add all sorts of functionality. All I did was add one of those — GeoMashup by Dylan Kuhn — and then figure out how to get it to display here. There’s a lot more we could do to improve the map page … and maybe we will.

Meanwhile, I cannot for the life of me figure out why the Map link from Luigi’s post on those long-crowing chickens goes to the right place, but does not show a pin. Most mysterious. some of the others aren’t showing pins either. I need to investigate. So I investigated, and it seems there’s nothing wrong after all. Must be some kind of browser cache voodoo. Enough.

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Tree farmers addicted to monoculture

Six months ago a storm knocked down more than 40 million trees in Germany. Most of them were spruce in huge monocultures. Environmentally savvy foresters, according to a report in Der Spiegel, had warned that large spruce plantations were a disaster waiting to happen. So, given an opportunity to replant after the storm and make use of natural tree diversity, including broadleaves, what are most tree farmers doing? Planting pure spruce again. And they are doing so with the help of large state subsidies.

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New efforts to domesticate grasses down under

The Australian Research Council has awarded A$ 1 million to Professor Robert Henry of Southern Cross University to examine about 1000 native grass species as potential replacements for wheat, rice and maize. The grant is framed as a response to global warming, but it is pretty interesting under any circumstances. Henry, Director of Southern Cross University’s Centre for Plant Conservation Genetics, told the Australian Associated Press that

the project targets the accelerated domestication of native species which have lower tillage and fertiliser requirements and increased salt, shade, frost and or drought tolerances than the current introduced cereal and fodder crops.

Of course, those grasses have been around since the first farmers landed in Australia, but they never tried to do anything with them. Because they couldn’t?

There is a great opportunity to use the new techniques of modern biology to accelerate the domestication of some of the more promising Australian native species.

Preliminary results are expected within three years, and seeds will be made available through a partnership with Native Seeds Pty Ltd. We shall see.