We’ve blogged a few times about the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), and I don’t really want to do so again at any length now. Suffice to say that the jury is still out on whether it works as advertised. The reason I bring it up at all is that I’ve just found out from CTA via their Facebook page that there’s a new SRI manual out, which on further investigation led me to the mother lode of SRI manuals, which turns out to be part-supported by the Better U Foundation. Yeah, I never heard of it either. But it clearly has a great interest in SRI, not to mention an inventive web designer. The philanthropist behind it? Jim Carrey. Yeah, that Jim Carrey. That’s a pitch I’d have liked to witness.
Nibbles: Seed savers, Lemons, Assam Rice, Striga control, Amaranth, Bearded pigs, Banana, Early nutrition
- Seed savers: everyone’s got an angle, from Seeds of Hope and Change to Seed Bank Bingo.
- Italian lemons enjoying a renaissance. In California, natch.
- India registers Assam farmers’ traditional rice varieties. In other news, rice water “is also used as shampoo, according to community elders”.
- US$9 million to “implement and evaluate four approaches” to controlling Striga in Africa. One day we’ll know.
- Denver Botanic Gardens does amaranth.
- Evolution of bearded pigs. Good to know. Good to eat?
- Bioversity banana team guest blogs at Annals of Botany. But surely they have a blog of their own. No, wait…
- Agriculture is bad for your health.
How to buy on-farm conservation
An item on the website of Conservation Magazine describes how best to buy ecosystem services. It distinguishes “payments for action” from “payments for results”.
Farmers in Europe, it says, are paid to mow their hayfields to create habitat for birds, and get the cash regardless of how many birds use the grasslands. That’s payment for action.
In Cambodia, by contrast, villagers are paid to conserve forests, “but only if visiting birdwatchers see certain unusual species”. Payment for results.
Most current schemes to pay for ecosystem services apparently reward actions, rather than results. But which method actually delivers better results?
In general, “payment by action is favored where there is a clear action” that will clearly benefit biodiversity and is relatively easy to measure, they concluded. So paying to increase wetland habitat for birds known to frequent marshes would make sense.
In contrast, in degraded landscapes, or in places where conservationists aren’t sure which actions will bring the most benefit, it might make more sense to pay for results.
The conclusions emerge not from any kind of field study but from a theoretical model “consisting of one conservation agency, one land manager and one patch of habitat. The model assumed that the land manager wanted to maximize income from the patch. The agency, meanwhile, had a limited budget and wanted to get the biggest biodiversity boost for its buck.”
How to apply this to on-farm conservation of agricultural biodiversity? It’s complex. Research is currently going on at Bioversity and elsewhere, with some nifty approaches that, for example, allow different communities to bid for the payments, establishing a market that economist Adam Drucker says allows you to get more conservation for the same amount of money. He has also been exploring the tensions between economic efficiency and social equity; do members of the community resent some being paid more than others for the “same” conservation. A peer-reviewed journal has accepted a paper for publication; we’ll bring you news of an “easier” version of the story when we have it.
Nibbles: Millet, Goat, Heirloom Veg, Tamarind, Rice domestication, Rice sustainability, Microbes, Competition
- The importance of multi-purpose crops in Africa.
- The importance of multi-purpose goats, everywhere.
- Target reader reviews The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Heirloom Vegetables.
- Tamarind charcoal loses out to tamarind drink, Malawian villagers rejoice.
- Has intellectual piracy been with us since humans first became engaged in agricultural production? AoB blog asks the tough ones.
- Land-use intensity and Ecological Engineering – Assessment Tools for risks and Opportunities in irrigated rice based production systems launched. Glad they have an acronym.
- Microbe diversity matters too.
- OK, so nobody nominated us, but the semi-finalists at the 3QD science writing competition have been announced.
Nibbles: Wheat disease, Dried vegetables, Gates spending in Africa, Canadian spending in India, Ethiopian wheat
- Wheat disease understood; sequence of leaf blotch fungus.
- Wheat disease conquered? “Super varieties” resistant to UG99 and yield 15% more. What could go wrong?
- Zambian farmers urged to dry vegetables for fun and profit (and better nutrition).
- Gates Foundations has spent US$1.7 billion on agriculture in Africa, so far.
- Swaminathan Foundation scores Canadian support for research on agriculture, poverty and nutrition. h/t PAR.
- Bioversity Seeds for Needs distributes preselected genebank wheat varieties to Ethiopian women farmers to adapt to climate change.