Category: Featured

Many thanks to Susan MacMillan of ILRI for facilitating one of the authors of a paper we nibbled, Dr Delia Grace, to respond to a couple of queries we had yesterday:

As you pointed out, the data on livestock is SSA is very poor. As a result our reasoning was deductive rather than inductive, based on evidence on the links between system change, genetic homogeneity, population density, transmission opportunities, species diversity etc. on disease emergence and endemicity; it was also based on our own experience (between us multiple decades) of livestock epidemiology in Africa. I can’t speak to use in FARA but the thinking around hot and cold spots is feeding into the CGIAR Consortium Research Program on Agriculture, Nutrition and Health. We are hoping this “megaprogram” will give us the opportunity of ground-truthing and quantifying these disease dynamics trajectories.

We really appreciate it when people respond to what we say here. We know they don’t have to. We know they have better things to do. We really appreciate it very much.

Back40 has this to say about farmers who encounter seed shortages:

All farmers, everywhere, have these issues and so they make plans ahead of time. If you show up at the last minute expecting to be able to buy whatever seed that you want you may be out of luck. This is called bad farming. The solution is not for a government or other org to enable bad farmers, it is to help them become good farmers.

Hard to disagree with that.

Andrew Forbes of the Brockwell Bake Association writes in to point out that they also have heritage wheat trials:

…I think around 90 accessions growing on two allotments and other locations in South London + farm South from London – though around 25 of these are samples of three specific UK origin pre-19th C wheats (Red Lammas, Old Hoary aka Kent wooly eared aka Ble a Duvet and Old Kent Red) collected form JIC and other European gene banks. We also have some material including a larger quantity of Blue Cone Rivet than has been in UK for many years (centuries?) from French farmer/wheat breeder and collector Florent Mercier.

Planning to have an open day for viewing of these trials on Rosendale Allotments on July 17th. To stay in touch with arrangements for this probably easiest to join Brockwell Bake as member (its free).

I think I just might! Oh and here’s a follow-up.

You may also like to check our anticipated heritage wheat programme for next few years here.

Rahul Goswami offers a big comment on a little Nibble, worth sharing more widely here:

Hullo, hullo? The Times of India has deigned to notice jowar? More significant in spades than the people it quotes is that this newspaper of upper middle class urban India is talking about what used to be stolid farmers’ fare. Yes, once in while when travelling through rural parts we ate the enormous ‘rotis’ made from jowar. Those, with some spicy mango pickle and a fresh-cut red onion and a dry cooked vegetable, was the staple lunchtime favourite, to be enjoyed in quiet contemplation under a neem or ‘jambul’ tree, while bold goats eyed your tiffin. Now, in the mall-lined main streets or urban Mumbai or Delhi, twee bakeries with cookie-cutter yuppies for clients display their ‘creations’ ‘enriched’ with jowar. Humble pickle? Robust allium cepa (the red onion)? Rural India? We don’t do rural, they say, and slide into their new BMWs, pleased with their new-organic-quaint discovery of jowar.

Michael Hermann asks “what constrains the use of breadfruit”?

The tree is to be found everywhere in the tropics, but except for Oceania is hardly ever used to any significant extent (except as an ornamental tree). I am afraid, awareness of the nutritional value won’t change that, as food choices continue to be mainly influenced by texture, taste and colour and other culinary attributes.

So, what are the constraints, and how might they be overcome?