- 26 million hectares of forest were lost in 2020.
- Genetic groups in grizzly bears line up with Indigenous languages in British Columbia. How about the trees, though?
- But why weren’t grizzly bears domesticated? Because they’re not friendly, feedable, fecund and family-friendly.
- Drones and wheat breeding.
- Crowdsourcing okra evaluation. No drones involved.
- Health-conscious urban Indians eat millet for health reasons. Goes great with okra.
- The Common Table: sharing stories about reforming the food system. Like a couple of the above.
Nibbles: Quinoa info, Hybrid rye, New tobacco, GMOs
- If you’re into quinoa, you’re probably going to need this directory.
- Hybrid rye is becoming a useful participant in maize-soybean rotations in the Corn Belt where giant ragweed is a problem.
- New insect-trapping wild tobacco species described from Australia.
- Biotechnologist and social scientist in conversation about genetic modification and gene editing.
Nibbles: Training materials double, Tree platform double, Wild rabbit, Economic value
- Crawford Fund training materials for high schools include discussion of genebanks.
- And that would go quite well with this graphic novel on natural selection in Mimulus from Health in Our Hands.
- There’s a Global Tree Knowledge Platform from ICRAF…
- …which could probably be usefully mashed up with the restoration platform Restor.
- The Sumatran striped rabbit makes a rare appearance. On Facebook.
- The World Bank makes the economic case for all of the above. Well, maybe except the Sumatran rabbit.
Smallholders still produce a lot of food
Hannah Ritchie of the indispensable Our World in Data has just come out with a useful summary of the data on how much food small and family farms produce. And one of the main points she makes is that those are two very different things. The bottom line is that smallholders (those farming 2 ha or less) account for 29% of the world’s agricultural production, at least as far as kilocalories are concerned 1, and family farms produce about 70-80%.
As rightly pointed out by Dr Ritchie, FAO has in the past said that small-scale farmers produce up to 70% of the world’s crops, a statistic that has been widely repeated. This is clearly wrong. However, to be fair to FAO, they have recently walked that back a bit, and their latest headline number is about a third. Which is still quite a lot really, and don’t forget that there are other things that small farms are good at.
Nibbles: Hedges, Mais, Papas, Protein
- Well of course there’s a hedge collection.
- Downloadable UNAM volume of the origin and diversification of maize (in Spanish).
- Catalog of the native potatoes curated by Indigenous communities in a region of Peru.
- I’m all for protein diversification, but what exactly is it?