The case against growing tobacco. So let’s ban it, right?
Big coffee study on the Big Island
The Garden Island News reports on a US$120,000 comprehensive study of coffee agroforestry that has just begun. The point seems to be to quantify the costs and benefits of growing coffee under an upper story of diverse forest trees. The article says that Pacific islanders traditionally grew crops in agroforestry systems, and that many are returning to similar practices. Benefits range from cooler air to fewer pests and diseases to greater resilience, all of which will be investigated.
The study will look at 12 existing shade-grown coffee orchards and compare them with five open-grown coffee orchards based on five key indicators: soil organic matter, major insect pests, yield and bean quality, production costs and market values, and environmental conditions such as shade levels, tree density and plant species present.
Alfred H. Peet dies
The “grandfather of specialty coffee” goes to the big caffè in the sky.
Cheese and olives
A column in the current issue of The Economist uses the example of Gruyère and Emmental cheeses in Switzerland to make the case that, if Europe wants to protect its traditional farmers and producers — and the agrobiodiversity which underpins their livelihoods — in the face of globalization, moving upmarket and selling expensive niche products to rich foreigners may be a better bet than “to deploy subsidies and tariffs to compete artificially on price.” Which is mostly what’s happening now.
[EU farm Commissioner] Mariann Fischer Boel … has urged food producers to focus on quality, heritage and new markets. This summer, she told exporters that import tariffs will move in only one direction in the coming years: “downwardsâ€.
Of course, that will require marketing savvy. It will also require a robust quality-monitoring and labelling systems. Because, as a New Yorker piece on the “slippery business” of trading in fake Italian extra virgin olive oil entertainingly demonstrates this week, there are plenty of wise guys around ready to exploit loopholes and weaknesses.
Later: Cheese, olives, and wine!
Feet of clay
That’s another one to tick off the life list. Above you see Zhu Youyong, who describes himself as a farmer. He happens also to be Distinguished Professor Zhu, President of Yunnan Agricultural College and a hero of mine.
Zhu’s name is associated with a method of growing rice that delivers higher, more stable yields with lower inputs of fungicides and a more stable harvest from year to year. Not bad for an amazingly simple idea. The problem is that traditional landraces of sticky rice, which farmers like to grow and to eat, are susceptible to fungal disease. They also have a nasty tendency to fall over, or lodge, especially when they are carrying a bountiful load of seed. Modern hybrids are disease resistant, and high-yielding, but the taste is not much to write home about. Yields are high, but prices are low. To grow the tasty traditional landraces, farmers need to be able to afford fungicides and they need to be able to overcome their tendency to lodge.