Category: Information

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How would you measure agricultural production?

Measuring agricultural productivity is easy, right? Kilogrammes per hectare and you’re done. But that’s almost the least interesting thing the land is producing, or so I thought. Then a tweet passed my way yesterday.

I saw that because someone I follow was, unsurprisingly, enthusiastic.

And despite myself, and despite the fact that I know that actual discussion is all but impossible over there, I tried to make a case for nutrition per hectare. Predictably, I guess, that ended up with a smug pat-on-the-head putdown that sent me whizzing to the channels under my control, ready to think a little more deeply about how to measure agricultural productivity.

If you’re an industrial farmer, growing grain to sell, then I guess kg per ha is a reasonable measure. You might even think kcal per ha a bit too fancy pants. And the less waste straw you have to deal with, the better. For a small-scale farmer, however, perhaps with a few animals to bed and feed, that straw is decidedly not waste. It is part of production. The weight of seed is important, but it isn’t the only thing.

Now go further, and imagine that you’re eating what the land produces. Maybe now kcal per ha makes a bit more sense, but only a bit more, and not only because it takes more than energy to sustain life. By that measure, half a hectare of beans and half a hectare of maize or wheat is probably less productive than a hectare of pure wheat. Cereals and pulses, however, make up for one another’s amino acid deficiencies, so the total nutrition that a person could derive from that half and half hectare is greater than from a pure hectare of either. Carve out some space in that hectare for a few rows of leafy greens and what have you, and the productivity of the land, measured as “nutrition” is even higher. Allow a few animals to process the “waste” and it is higher still.

Which is why I think nutrition per hectare is the best measure of agricultural production.

Calories are, of course, part of nutrition, but by no means the most important part over the long run. We have tables of recommended daily allowances for macronutrients like Calories (or their proxies) and for micronutrients. We could calculate nutrients per Calorie for different kinds of produce. We could even try to express productivity as the percentage of the RDA for all nutrients that would be provided by some area of land. We could do lots of things more sensible — and more difficult — than Calories per hectare.

p.s. I want to put a marker down here for a couple of things I know are important and that I am choosing to ignore for now. One is the inputs necessary to achieve the agricultural outputs. The other is the sustainability and variance of the production over time.

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Brainfood: Domestication stats, Apple vulnerability, Himalayan fermentation, Tree diversity, Grasslands double, Shiitake cultivation, Lablab core, Ethiopian sweet potato, Georgian grape

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De-balkanizing crop genomics

Genomics has a data problem, according to Nature. Not perhaps as big as YouTube’s, but…

Nevertheless, Desai says, genomics will have to address the fundamental question of how much data it should generate. “The world has a limited capacity for data collection and analysis, and it should be used well. Because of the accessibility of sequencing, the explosive growth of the community has occurred in a largely decentralized fashion, which can’t easily address questions like this,” he says. Other resource-intensive disciplines, such as high-energy physics, are more centralized; they “require coordination and consensus for instrument design, data collection and sampling strategies”, he adds. But genomics data sets are more balkanized, despite the recent interest of cloud-computing companies in centrally storing large amounts of genomics data.
…
Astronomers and high-energy physicists process much of their raw data soon after collection and then discard them, which simplifies later steps such as distribution and analysis. But genomics does not yet have standards for converting raw sequence data into processed data.

Leave aside for a minute that last sentence, which is generating some heat on Twitter…

…it is certainly worthwhile highlighting the balkanization of genomics datasets. But then, why not mention that in at least one area — crop diversity — there are some useful initiatives underway, like DivSeek. Which Nature knows about.

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The phylogeny of Czech hops

Long breeding work aimed at fine aroma hops results in high quality aroma aspects, which are used to produce the best beer. Czech hops are the security of the highest brewing quality in many breweries all over the world. Saaz hops are considered as the standard of high brewing quality not only in Czech Republic but in other countries as well. Saaz hops are a very important raw material for the best quality beer. All Czech hop varieties, which have been developed recently, have in their origin Saaz and therefore they show excellent brewing characteristics.

You had me at beer.

hop-phylogeny