- More audio aquaponics goodness.
- “The road from growing rice to raising shrimp to misery.”
- Angola’s national strategy on food, nutritional security includes seeds. Anyone know more?
- Handbook for School Gardens.
- Oh no, climate change to screw up Czech hops! Now I’m really mad.
Nibbles: Urban agriculture, Rural agriculture, Assisted migration, FAO prize, Traditional medicine, Diseaese
- IDRC reports on Agriculture in urban planning.
- French end subsidy hypocrisy. Mais non? Mais oui! Via .
- More on assisted migration.
- Chinese pig farmer wins FAO plaudits.
- India puts traditional remedies into public domain for their own good.
- Kenyan crops in trouble from diseases.
Nibbles: Fraxinus, Sheep, Fish, Potato, Chickens, Eden, Microlivestock, Saliva, Mashua, Vine
- Chinese ash seeds go to Ft Collins (et al.) to fight emerald ash borer.
- And also colonial sheep.
- One fish goes up, another down. That’s life, I guess.
- Potatoes fried by climate change?
- What chicken breed is right for you?
- Agrobiodiversity bears fruit at Eden!
- Fish and snail farming in West Africa.
- “The saliva microbiome does not vary substantially around the world.â€
- Mashed mashua, anyone?
- Earliest evidence of vine cultivation in China.
New Scientist on how to get through the next 100 years
An article in New Scientist tells us how to survive the 21st century, what with climate change and all.
There’s a paragraph on agriculture ((The links are provided as in the original article. I didn’t add them myself.)):
Since water will be scarce, food production will need to be far more efficient. Hot growing seasons will be more common, meaning that livestock will become increasingly stressed, and crop growing seasons will shorten, according to David Battisti of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues (Science, vol 323, p 240). We will need heat and drought-tolerant crop varieties, they suggest. Rice may have to give way to less thirsty staples such as potatoes.
The interactive map also has stuff on agriculture. Check out in particular Southern Europe, where, apparently, “[a]lthough agriculture will be largely impossible, hardy animals such as goats will be kept on the fringes of the desert.”
Blooming desert
The picture, from Google Earth, shows a bit of Sudan in December 2003. The white line is 1 km long. I think that’s standing water just above the line, with quite large trees north of the water. How they got there made my jaw drop.
John Greenfield ((Please, please let that be his real last name, for the sake of nominative determinism.)) was working on a “Savannah Development Project” almost 40 years ago. The project required a D6 Caterpillar bulldozer to make airstrips for the project’s plane. In between times, John put the bulldozer to other uses:
I constructed a massive absorption bank across a dry Wadi in order to show the Sudanese, the importance of moisture conservation. I remember when I was building this bank thinking, you will be able to see this from the air.
And you surely can! As John points out, one of the big problems with desert soils is that they crust over, so that any rain that does fall runs off and does not penetrate. Slow the flow down, with any kind of barrier on a contour, and the water goes into the soil. John’s idea was for “linear farms” established behind vetiver hedges.
Once you have collected runoff from a wadi, and let it soak in to the soil you can grow some very useful crops that would have been impossible without the moisture conservation. The biggest problem with deserts is uncontrolled runoff – hence my idea of ‘Linear farms’ behind vetiver hedges – a farm 10m wide X 1000m along the hedge equals 1 ha. That is a hectare of land that would produce well, as opposed to the thousands of hectares of little farms producing a few survivors of what was planted.
When I worked in this desert, I use to visit these little farms and talk with the farmers ( who made their money out of collecting Gum Arabic, and were bloody well robbed) We would look at their ‘farm’ and there would be a dozen or so stalks of sorghum waving in the breeze and I would ask why they thought those plants grew well when the rest failed – no idea – on closer inspection of the surviving individuals, they were all, without exception, growing in hollows in the field that the runoff had collected in. Now, I said, if we extended these ‘hollows’ around the contour or across the slope (made contour furrows) then all the seed would flourish. And doing just that enabled me to produce the heaviest crops of Sorghum this area had ever seen.
Did anything ever become of the idea? I doubt it, or we would surely have heard about it. But it seems on the face of it a brilliant technique for using agrobiodiversity to enable farmers to grow more agricultural biodiversity.
And if you want to see for yourself, point GE at 13 05’22.52â€N 30 14’09.07â€E