Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Climate Feedback is a blog hosted by Nature Reports: Climate Change to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming.
There’s not a huge amount on agriculture normally, but a post yesterday from the Copenhagen conference mentions not one but two people whose (independent) work on the effect of climate change on agriculture we’ve mentioned a number of times, Marshall Burke from Stanford and Andy Jarvis from Bioversity International.
From Andy Jarvis:
What if major coffee regions in Latin America were to disappear altogether in the next generation? What would that mean for you as a consumer? Or your children? And what about coffee farmers in Latin America? And their children? What will they do if their livelihoods disappear? At CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture), we have been working for years to develop crop targeting tools based on climate scenarios that show how climate change could alter production systems throughout the region in the years to come. We propose to expand our work to generate a range of possible scenarios for changing patterns of land use in Mexico and Central America, and to partner with CRS (Catholic Relief Services) to help coffee farmers develop strategies to more effectively mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change under each one. In collaboration with CRS, we can directly impact 7000 farmers and generate learning that helps hundreds of thousands more.
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Not strictly relevant to our self-imposed beat, of course, but as it already gave my compadre Luigi a quick post I feel I ought to share …
There’s a strange phenomenon (in whose origin, I freely admit, I had some impact) called nominative determinism. Briefly, your name suits your job and, of course, vice versa. Thus Lord Brain was an eminent neurologist before he was ennobled. So at a talk this morning on wise management of water resources, I perked up when I saw that the crucial research on partial rootzone drying was by a man called Peter Dry. Luigi was good enough to check the reference, and indeed, Hormonal changes induced by partial rootzone drying of irrigated grapevine exists and Dry is one of the authors.
All fun aside, it is a valuable technique for reducing water use by up to 50% while still maintaining good grape production and, apparently, a pretty drinkable vintage. No word though of whether the wine was a tad brut too.
Our occasional contributor Andy Jarvis unleashes the changing geography of agricultural suitability on an unsuspecting world in Copenhagen.