Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Thanks to Amanda for sending us this photo of one of the exhibits at the Opium Museum at Chiang Saen, Thailand, which is in the middle of the Golden Triangle. A nice way of displaying variation in local knowledge about agricultural practices, in this case the cropping calendar. It was not accompanied, alas, by a similar display of differences in crop or variety menus, alas. But one can imagine how that too could be made rather attractive.
Great video from the Breadfruit Institute on the importance of that fruit in Hawaii.
Philippine National Genebank, a set by Global Crop Diversity Trust on Flickr.
Last Friday, under the upgrading project we mentioned that same day, the Filipino national genebank’s three transformers were adapted to handle the increased power demand. Early Saturday morning the power unfortunately failed. When it came back on, the fire started, perhaps due to a wiring fault. The 2nd floor was destroyed. That housed the in vitro lab, with duplicates of collections of banana, taro, sweet potato and yams which are also maintained in the field. The 1st floor is ok, except for some flooding damage from the fire engines, which affected chemicals and some equipment in the molecular lab. Some data has also been lost. Thankfully, there were no casualties. Our best wishes to the staff for a rapid recovery from this calamity.
CORRECTION: The 2nd floor of the building housed the molecular and cytological characterization labs, as well as the in vitro conservation unit and the documentation unit, library and reseach staff offices. The 1st floor has the in vitro research lab, seed research lab, morphological characterization lab and more research staff offices.
Prof Roger Leakey, sometime of ICRAF (among other places), where he pioneered tree domestication in support of rural livelihoods, and now Vice Chairman of the International Tree Foundation, has a fascinating new book in the offing.
In contrast to the doom and gloom often emanating from the tropics, ‘Living with the Trees of Life’ illustrates how many different aspects of agricultural science can be combined into a more robust approach to farming, which will be productive, as well as more environmentally and socially sustainable. This approach uses agroforestry as a delivery mechanism for multifunctional agriculture aimed at addressing the cycle of land degradation and social deprivation in the tropics. A key role in this is played by the ‘Trees of Life’, the large number of indigenous trees that produce marketable fruits, nuts, medicines and other products of day-to-day importance in the lives of local people throughout the tropics.
The book promises to be very practical.
A 3-step approach is described which can be used to close the Yield Gap (the difference between the yield potential of food crops and the yields actually achieved by farmers). This pays special attention to land husbandry and to the wise use of the natural resources which support agriculture and the livelihoods of poor farmers. By closing the Yield Gap agroforestry builds on the advances of the Green Revolution.
Builds on those advances while avoiding its pitfalls, and indeed rectifying its more regrettable consequences, one assumes.
Finally, all this comes together in a set of five ‘Convenient Truths’ which highlight that we have most of the knowledge and skills we need. This is illustrated by the Equator Prize winning project ‘Food for Progress’, in Cameroon, a project which has also been recognized by UK Government’s Office for Science as an African Success Story.
I had a little trouble identifying this project, but I believe I finally found it, and very interesting it sounds too.
Look out for the book in July, from CABI.
