- The Arid Lands Information Network has published a briefing on Climate change and the threat to African food security.
- Free Seeds, Not Free Beer. A paper on intellectual property rights. Luigi asks: Why not both?
- Urban farming around the world, a slideshow. No wonder Back40 thinks its all hobby or hack.
- More urban farms in the US. Enough already!
- See the spud behind the Irish Potato Famine. Today. In Guelph. That’s Canada.
- Napier Stunt Disease threat to Ugandan milk production.
- The Ecosystems Map of the Northern and Central Andes is out.
Nibbles: Organocontroversy, Small farms, Organic can feed world, Cashmere
- Are Organic Veggies Better for You? Maybe, or maybe not. Either way, it’s a useless debate. Yay!
- Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty. Yay!
- “Study after study show that organic techniques can provide much more food per acre in developing countries than conventional chemical-based agriculture.” Define organic.
- Fashionistas driving desertification in Mongolia.
Chicomecoatl the Maize Goddess restored
Click on the photo to find out more.
Towards an ecologically-informed agriculture
What we’ve tried to do on a couple of occasions is look at conferences or publications of perhaps only slight overall agrobiodiversity interest and highlight the little bits that do fit here. So it’s nice when someone does it for us. The Ecological Society of America‘s 94th Annual Meeting is currently on in Albuquerque, New Mexico and, among all the other stuff, there’s a session presenting “ideas on how our agricultural practices can take lessons from natural environments.” Fortunately, EurekAlert is there, with summaries of presentations on turning annual crops into perennials, landscape diversity and pest enemies, and reduced tilling and soil microbe diversity. ESA has a blog, EcoTone, as well as a stable of journals. Nature’s blogger is also at the conference.
Nibbles: Cacao, Soil mapping, Rice terraces, Maize, Cereus
- “USDA’s Bourlaug International Science Fellows Program has partnered with non-profit and for-profit organizations to identify new agricultural techniques for cocoa cultivation and to control cocoa diseases.” And do some conservation and breeding, surely.
- Big shots call for a decent global digital soil map. Seconded.
- Cool photos of rice agricultural landscapes.
- Roasting maize, Mexico style. Oh yeah, there’s also a nifty new maize mapping population out.
- Peruvian apple cactus doing just fine in Israel.