Indian farmer shows breeders a thing or two.
Feeding livestock
New Agriculturist focuses on livestock feed and fodder systems.
Nigerian farmers do their own research
From allAfrica.com, an astonishing story of what farmers can achieve, with a little assistance, when they start investigating their options.
Abdul Malik, a farmer aged 30, says he gathers 15 to 17 100kg bags of millet using improved varieties, where he used to gather only 10. With his increased income, he bought two new soil tilling machines this year, where before he had just one. “I’m satisfied at this level [of production,]” he says, “but I continue to hope for more improvement.”
The improved varieties were gathered from 16 African countries and trialled by the farmers on their own land in northern Nigeria. The project, supported by IFAD, also examined fertilizers and methods to control weeds, and promises to deliver benefits beyond the farmers and their immediate families to middlemen and others. There’s a lot more in the article and an accompanying photo essay. ((Slightly worried that allAfrica.com may put articles behind a paywall at some point in the future, so here’s a link to a site scraper that perhaps will keep it available. Hard to understand, though, where they got the “hybrid” in their title from, or why they tagged it “biotechnology” and “IITA”.))
Dust my broom
Back in the late 1700’s, Benjamin Franklin found a small seed on a whisk broom that a friend had brought him from France for dusting his beaver hat. Next spring he planted that seed and it grew into a tall corn-like plant with a flowering brush of stiff fibers bearing seeds.
Can that possibly be true? That the entire American broom industry is based on a single accidental sorghum seed? Must be, I got it from an official document, here. And I got that from this merry flight of fancy: A Farrago On Brooms, Broomcorn, and Broom Dusting. Full of interesting nuggets, some wicked satire, and whole lot of entertainment.
Second “Farmer First”
This totally passed me by. The Institute of Development Studies just hosted a workshop entitled ‘Farmer First Revisited‘ from 12-14 December 2007, “to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the original ‘Farmer First’ event.” That event (and the associated book) was quite a milestone, and the papers presented at this month’s reprise look worthy of their illustrious predecessors presented back in July 1987. The very Web 2.0 conference website includes a timeline and blog.