Category: Featured

Cary waxes lyrical on the origins of agriculture:

We who love diversity and love agricultural history should revel in the complexity of the subject. Smith’s profound and insightful work adds so much. I only wish more of us appreciated it. If more did, imagine how differently we in the genetic resources community might see the world. It would, actually, change the world.

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?