Category: Featured

Elizabeth’s experience of social networking and breeders suggests that they just want to exchange expertise:

If you ask them about the web site of their dreams, they rank high the ability to contact their peers on the web and be alerted whenever a new item is posted. They seek for exchange of expertise. So, sounds like a Ning type site or Facebook group could do it!

Well, what are they waiting for?

Andre has “great, great trouble with the data” from that vegetables and PVP paper:

For instance, the table says that no turnip has ever been PVP protected; according to the Office’s data base, two have been. The authors highlighted in a previous paper, with a ‘hurrah’, that Fowler and Mooney made a math error in their 1983 “Shattering…”. They also succumb to a simple subtraction at the bottom of the first column.

There’s more. Over to the authors… BTW, our original source was the CAS-IP blog.

Dirk on the pragmatics of learning to use fertilizers:

Excessive use of nitrogen fertilisers hurts the hip pocket nerve, particularly if it does not translate into expected yield increases. It looks like some Chinese farmers are “learning by doing” about modern fertilisers. That is a valid learning strategy, highly valued in the adult learning field.

Will it hurt hard enough, quickly enough for China’s farmers?

Rhizowen summarizes what China’s farmers are doing to their soil:

Farmers of Forty Centuries blow it in a few decades. They’ll be needing a lot more land – somewhere else and soon. Any spare continents going?

Ford reminds us that, if you’re going to feed the world, there’s more to animals than meat and milk:

There are some other potential benefits to using animals, despite their intrinsic inefficiency. They can buffer food supply: build up herds in good years, eat them (and any grain they would have eaten) when crops fail. See “Future Harvest: pesticide-free farming” (or similar title) for other benefits: growing more soil-conserving forages becomes more economic, graze weedy fields rather than building up weed seed bank, etc.

That title? Future Harvest: Pesticide-free Farming (Our Sustainable Future).