Category: Featured

Anne-Marie has a bone to pick with Vel Gnanendran, head of DFID’s Tanzania office:

Too right that that ‘people like [him] need to get much better at understanding the complexity and long-term nature of agricultural change.’ Anyone whose prior agricultural experience is apparently limited to growing ‘watercress’ from seed in a yoghurt pot at a primary school (it probably wasn’t watercress, luv) sounds like they are at the bottom of a very steep learning curve…funded by my taxes. For the sake of the Tanzanian people, I do hope that those designing and running agriculture projects under him have substantially more experience and expertise in agriculture.

Ouch.

My mate Danny knows a think or two about Maldivian melons:

Maldives is an interesting place for watermelons. I worked on the island of Thoddoo (in Alif Alif Atoll) back in the nineties on an IPM programme for watermelons. Thoddoo is the largest producer of watermelons (or was?) in the Maldives, strategically targeting the demand during the holy month of Ramadan in nearby Male.

But are they like Remaissance melons? Not that kind of melon, I guess.

Nate Kleinman of Experimental Farm Network is not at all upset we reprinted his melon post from Facebook:

Thanks for posting this. We’re clearly excited about these interesting melons. At the end of the season we plan to compile information on everything we grew this year and last to report back to the USDA. This not only helps their science, but also helps them justify their budgets in the inevitable DC budget fights ahead. It’s important for people who use this unique and critically important resource (the National Plant Germplasm System) to lay out and explain what’s so special about it. These melons are just the tip of the iceberg.

Wish all genebank users were so obliging.

Matthew parses “diversity,” as used by Secretary Vilsack:

I wasn’t there, but I have heard him speak about “diversity” several times before and he usually brings diversity up in the context of types (organic, conventional, biotech) and scales of farming systems. I’ve also heard him bring it up in terms of racial and gender diversity in farming.

So, probably NOT crop diversity? Seems a pity.

Because he’s way too modest to do this himself, and because I agree 100%, here’s what Stephanie Greene, of the USDA, had to say about Luigi’s essay on agricultural biodiversity:

You have written a wonderful essay that manages to beautifully describe the importance of crop diversity to the lay public and that resonates with both sides of the technological divide.

All hail Luigi.