The news a few days back that climate change is affecting the quantity and quality of the mango harvest in India was followed today by similar worries about cherries in Italy. I wonder. There’s no real evidence presented that these difficulties are part of a long-term trend. But it would also be interesting to know if different varieties are reacting in different ways. For example, how are the last four remaining trees of the Noor Jahan mango variety coping?
Energy special
Hot on the heels of our concerns about carbon sequestration, biofuels, biochar, EGS and all that malarkey, The Economist has a special issue this week on Alternative Energy. ((Not sure how much of it is available to non-subscribers; if that link doesn’t work, please let me know.)) And what’s that got to do with agrobiodiversity? Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Nibbles: Bananas, Wheat, Cameroon, Bees, Eden, Millennium Villages, Organic, Yam, Ag origins, Apricots
- Compare and contrast the banana and the Big Mac. Dan Koeppel takes it to the masses.
- Lamenting the loss of “amber waves of grain”. Ingrate.
- Cameroon’s agriculture vulnerable to climate change. I’ll alert the media.
- Look what I got you for National Pollinator Week next week; a World Checklist of Bees. Neat-o.
- Celebrate food and farmers in Eden.
- “The core of the strategy is a short-term provision of improved seeds suited to the local environment and fertilizers like Di-Ammonium Phosphate (DAP) and urea accompanied by advice on how to use them.” Sounds familiar…
- Meanwhile, in non-Millennium Villages: “While his maize cobs were smaller than others, the seed was of a much higher quality; the fibre of his cotton was also much longer.”
- Japanese yam fields in peril. Yams as in Dioscorea or sweet potato or what? So annoying.
- Neolithic myths?
- California apricot grower explores Central Asia, comes up trumps. Jeremy comments: CandyCots? I think I want to be sick.
Maybe bio-char does have a part to play
Terra preta is the very fertile black soil found mostly in parts of the Amazon basin, and believed to have been created by people mixing fine particles of charcoal and other stuff into the soil. A whole lot of voodoo has grown up around the subject, with unscrupulous charlatans, head in the sand naysayers and all manner of other life forms clustering around the idea. Some people think that one can create terra preta by adding bio-char to the soil, and that miracles will ensue.
I recently dumped on biofuels from a great height because in essence they are mining the soil. Doesn’t matter how slowly; at some point, the fun will have to stop. In the comments on that post, Karl and Anastasia weighed in by saying that bio-char, a potential residue after extracting bioenergy, could be returned to the land to close the loop. I dumped on that idea too.
Now I’m not so sure. Continue reading “Maybe bio-char does have a part to play”
Nibbles: Bananas, Cassava, Coconuts, Potato, Training, Wild poultry, EU regulations, Saving seeds
- No rice? Eat bananas!
- “Whatever the cultivation and consumption of cassava mean to us as Jamaicans, it cannot be just a source of comic relief.”
- Climate change good for coconuts. Well that’s a relief.
- Spud slide show.
- Gubernator helps Chile with its genetic resources. Sarah Connor unavailable for comment.
- Galliformes conservation in SE Asia. No, nothing to do with the French.
- “…the white part of the leek must represent at least one-third of the total length or half the sheathed part.” Yeah, that makes sense.
- “You really see that it’s the poor and persecuted who have been the seed savers.”