And another.
Hours of innocent fun.
What to call a monoculture if it isn’t a monoculture?
If someone is serious about a critique of modern agriculture, “monoculture” is not the best term to use – particularly if you want to communicate with farmers. The real issue is the difference between “diverse rotations” and “non-diverse rotations.”
Yup, that’s going to work.
Steve Savage offers his interpretation of the word, and how not to use it if you “are being critical of mainstream farming”. As I noted on his blog, I’m not about to do a point-by-point rebuttal. Life’s too short. And language is alive. But if that photograph of “a 700+ year-old farming system in China” is a monoculture, I’m a cantankerous nutcase with a blog to prove it.
Maps of Russian agrobiodiversity online, again
We blogged about AgroAtlas some years back, but a big article in USDA’s newsletter gives us a welcome opportunity of pointing out again how cool it is. The much-awaited GIS layers are in a funny format, though, which I’d be interested to know how to convert to something that can be viewed in Google Earth.
Nibbles: Micronutrients, Population, Opium, Nixtamalization, Chocolate, Seed swap, Dog domestication, Meeting, Biofuel failure, Mesquite
- “Organic management practices appear to result in elevated levels of grain micronutrient concentration.” By no means the whole story.
- Tom too takes The Economist to task.
- Afghanistan’s opium growers. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
- Nixtamalization for the rest of us. More than you could ever want to know. Rye tortillas!
- Chocolate began with leftover beer? Seems unlikely.
- Take the fight to the monster’s lair. Swap seeds in Brussels. h/t Patrick.
- Dogs or dholes? Yeah I didn’t know what they were either.
- There was a workshop on “Seed System and Climate Change” in Bhutan a month ago.
- Big biofuel project in Tanzania bites the dust. And the land they “leased,” what happened to that?
- Ancient grinding holes. Might mesquite be another edible never domesticated?
Historical agrobiodiversity photographs online
I’m not sure why I like old photographs of markets so much, but one reason may be because at the back of my mind is the thought that maybe photos such as the one from Uzbekistan in the 1950s at left and similar ones from 1920s Egypt could be used to gauge genetic erosion. Too bad the metadata for the stock imagery at National Geographic (where the Egypt photographs came from) doesn’t include date. Anyway, speaking of agrobiodiversity photographs from Egypt, the wonderful Saudi Aramco World also has some in its latest issue.