Category: Climate change

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Geo mashup artist needed

Luigi mentioned the UK Science’s Museum’s interactive map on climate change and crops. Elsewhere, ((Yes, there is life outside agro.agro.biodiver.se.)) he draws attention to maps of diabetes around the world. Now I find a map of “small farms” in the US.

What I want, obviously, is a graphic that will show me any relationships between the prevalence of small farms and diabetes, over time, corrected for access to the internet, obviously, and for the whole world. Not a lot to ask, is it? Oh, and I can’t find diabetes at Gapminder World.

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How to breed for the future

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at PBForum, an e-mail based forum for plant breeding and related fields managed by GIPB. It started out with a question from a Philippines breeder about how to get climate-ready rice varieties. I was particularly struck by the latest contribution, which basically said that, rather, we should be trying to…

…create climate-change-ready breeding programmes. That is, build in the flexibility to shift relatively quickly to a new climate related breeding objective, once it becomes established in what direction the climate will change and how it will affect crop yield.

What I would add is that such “climate-change-ready breeding programmes” would necessarily include ready access to as wide a range of raw materials as possible, including, crucially, properly evaluated collections of landraces and crop wild relatives conserved in, and readily accessible from, genebanks.

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Nibbles: Sheep, Syrup, Antioxidants, Urban flora, Politics, Erosion, Prince, India and climate change

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Coping with climate change

SciDev.net reports on a project launched a couple of years ago to unite farmers, weather-wallahs and government in Benin to “help farmers make informed choices about when to sow and harvest crops”. About 300 farmers are enrolled in 60 field schools across the country.

[T]o develop, test and implement farming strategies suited to local conditions. These include mulching, planting pits, adopting integrated crop management and using organic fertilisers.

What, no agricultural biodiversity? No new varieties or crop selection? No participatory plant breeding? We think they’re missing a trick.