Climate change

March 23, 2011March 23, 2011

More messing about with Droppr

I continued my exploration of IFPRI’s wonderful Droppr software by looking at its future climate tool. You click on a spot on the Earth and it tells you how total precipitation and average temperature will change, for each month of the year. Again, I did it for the mother-in-law’s farm, and this is the result:

Looks pretty bad, at least for temperature. Although of course, for maize at least, which is the main food crop in that area, what you really want to know is peak, rather than average, temperatures. That’s according to a study by David Lobell and Marianne Bänziger we nibbled a few days back, and which recently got a big write up in The Economist:

Days above 30°C are particularly damaging. In otherwise normal conditions, every day the temperature is over this threshold diminishes yields by at least 1%. Moreover, days where the temperature exceeds 32°C do twice the harm of those at 31°C. And during a drought, things are worse still. Then, yields take a hit of 1.7% per day over 30°C.

March 18, 2011

Nibbles: ABS in ITPGRFA, Wheat Yield Consortium, Plasticity and climate change, Sustainable intensification, Early agriculture

Outstanding Issues on ABS under the Multilateral System – a background study paper. Wait, there’s outstanding issues?
Wheat geeks meet.
Plastic plants will cope with climate change. Not what you think.
Nice write-up of the UK Foresight Food and Farming Futures report on Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture in Africa from Farming First.
First farmers not as productive as last foragers. One wonders why they bothered.

March 14, 2011March 14, 2011

Nibbles: Mead, Treaty, Zoonoses, Flowery margins, Post-doc, Sacred Groves, Posters, Maize in Africa.

Mead, part 4. You can find 1-3 yourselves.
Plant genetic resources key to food security. The Jakarta Post gets it.
Long, complex post from ILRI on zoonoses; diseases that infect people and animals.
What are all the flowers for? The Provincial Agricultural Chamber of East Flanders seeks answers. h/t PAR.
Wanna do a post-doc on Comprehensive modelling of agro-biodiversity in relation to seed exchange networks?
Sacred groves threatened, by Times of India.
Fabulous botanical posters, many featuring useful species, and all useful information. Of course tomatoes are fruits.
I meant to write in detail about how Untapped crop data from Africa predicts corn peril if temperatures rise, but you know, life intervened.

March 10, 2011March 10, 2011

Nibbles: Micronutrients, Population, Opium, Nixtamalization, Chocolate, Seed swap, Dog domestication, Meeting, Biofuel failure, Mesquite

“Organic management practices appear to result in elevated levels of grain micronutrient concentration.” By no means the whole story.
Tom too takes The Economist to task.
Afghanistan’s opium growers. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Nixtamalization for the rest of us. More than you could ever want to know. Rye tortillas!
Chocolate began with leftover beer? Seems unlikely.
Take the fight to the monster’s lair. Swap seeds in Brussels. h/t Patrick.
Dogs or dholes? Yeah I didn’t know what they were either.
There was a workshop on “Seed System and Climate Change” in Bhutan a month ago.
Big biofuel project in Tanzania bites the dust. And the land they “leased,” what happened to that?
Ancient grinding holes. Might mesquite be another edible never domesticated?

March 9, 2011March 9, 2011

Diversifying Crops May Protect Yields in the Face of a More Variable Climate

That’s the headline on a note from the American Institute of Biological Sciences, which publishes the excellent BioScience. Resilience in Agriculture through Crop Diversification: Adaptive Management for Environmental Change, a review by Brenda Lin of the CSIRO in Australia, pulls together lots of studies ¹ from lots of places and lots of species (and varieties) to come to the conclusion that, yes, indeed,

Understanding the potential of increasing diversity within farm systems is essential to helping farmers adapt to greater climate variability of the future. By adopting farm systems that promote ecosystem services for pest and disease control and resilience to climate change variability, farmers are less at risk to production loss and are more generally resilient to environmental change.

Thanks Eve.