Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
I hadn’t known about lucuma yogurt (or yoghurt) before seeing this in Lima. Wikipedia says it’s a popular ice cream flavour. I haven’t tried that, but the yogurt is great.
And speaking of added-value products of agrobiodiversity, how about this: potato chips (or crisps) from a whole range of different weird Peruvian high-altitude varieties:
An article in the latest Economist discusses the Malawi fertilizer subsidy programme. There’s been a fair amount in the media about this lately, and in particular about whether the bumper maize harvests of the past couple of years can be attributed to the extra fertilizer ((Incidentally, there’s an interesting NY Times video on what the rising cost of fertilizers means for farmers in the US.)) now finding its way onto farmers’ fields increasingly sown to modern varieties, or just to better rains. I think the jury is still out on that one, but check out this statement from the piece in The Economist:
…local seed varieties, little altered from those first brought by the Portuguese centuries ago…
I don’t know about you, but I think that rather underestimates the power of natural selection, drift and recombination. Not to mention 500 growing seasons’ worth of painstaking selection by twenty generations of African farmers.
You may remember a post a few days ago summarizing something of a milestone paper by Bioversity scientists and partners which analyzed ten years’ worth of data on the diversity of 27 crops on farms in 8 countries around the world. As you’ll see if you revisit the original post, there’s been interesting discussion of the paper in the comments section. But I’ve been engaging the writers by email as well and it might be worth recounting the gist of that conversation.
The main point, I guess, is that they consider the crux of the paper as not so much the discussion of how/why diversity is being maintained on farm, as the fact that the richness/evenness relationship makes it possible to estimate one from the other (though separately for different kinds of crops). They see this as establishing really quite a novel framework for discussing — and generating hypotheses about — crop diversity.
It seems to me the discussion has started already.