Not sure what to make of this. A European Research Headline piece of news gives some information about a project to use molecular genetics, socio-economics and geostatistics to decide which populations of sheep and goats are worth conserving. But the article doesn’t actually say anything about the project’s conclusions. And when I looked earlier today the project web site had not been updated since Agusut 2006. That’s annoying because the results could well be interesting and I’d really like to know how they analyzed the information and how they used it to advise policymakers.
Award for The Land Institute
Wes Jackson, the pioneer of perennial prairie polyculture, is to receive the 6th Environmental Award from Prescott College in Arizona for the work of The Land Institute, according to a press release. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Jackson and his vision of what agriculture could be, really learning from nature to craft a more sustainable farming system. It’ll be a while before we are “growing granola” in his immortal phrase, but The Land Institute’s experiments on mixtures of four or more species, drawn from different families to make optimal use of resources, are proceeding apace. The Prescott College award is by no means the first Jackson has received, but every bit helps to draw the attention of mainstream research to his ideas. Which is why I’m blogging it, I suppose.
Boosting the Indian rice crop
A report in The Hindu says that scientists in the Indian state of Kerala want to increase the production of rice. Nothing special there. But the report does single out the need for “efforts on a fast track to survey, identify, catalogue and conserve all traditional plant varieties of rice as part of the measures to increase productivity”. Of course it does not say exactly how that knowledge will be used to breed better rice. But another paper at the Kerala Science Congress “Biodiversity of rice in Kerala” said that many of the traditional rice varieties offered a pool of resistant genes against insect pests. And a team of Kerala Agriculture University scientists, in its paper on the “Scope of crop diversification,” called for rice-based integrated farming system.
You can’t do that in Europe
Scripps Howard News Service hosts a time-hallowed “I’m reading my seed catalogs” article, so prevalent during the winter months. As if to mock the European seed trade rules, the author focuses on all the weird and wonderful things she is able to try, thanks to small companies that specialize in biodiversity. While I, personally, would not buy seeds from at least one of the companies she names, I would at least like the pleasure of being able to boycott them, rather than have some faceless bureaucrats tell me what I may and may not grow.
Trade information by mobile
Between the Common Catalogue on one side and regulations on the entry of new agricultural products on the other, it does sometimes seem like the EU just doesn’t want farmers to grow diverse crops, either within its borders or indeed anywhere else on Earth. Anyway, on the latter issue, maybe one of the answers is for developing world farmers to trade more among themselves. One of the bottlenecks to that, of course, is the availability of price and other information. So it was really interesting to read in The Economist about tradenet, an internet application developed by a software company out of Ghana that enables users to exchange market information, including by SMS text messages. Mobile telephony is of course expanding at tremendous speed in Africa. Tradenet is basically a sort of eBay for agricultural products, where you can put in your bid by cell phone. And more. Listen to this: “we will incorporate the ability to generate digital maps of your country with overlays of pricing for commodities, as well as include key markets in neighboring countries, where you can zoom or pan around vector maps.” Cool or what?