- “Coffee and cocoa yes, coca no.”
- 1st All Africa Horticulture Congress.
- Carotenoid and vitamin content of Micronesian atoll foods: Pandanus (Pandanus tectorius) and garlic pear (Crataeva speciosa) fruit.
- A Family Year: a 5-part television series focusing on the health and environmental threats facing families in Russia and Central Europe.
- Natbar Sarangi: one man Indian rice genebank.
- Climate change “might hinder coconut production“.
Shock horror! Natural selection true!
Just fancy that. A survey of farmers and their weeds has come up with some fascinating results.
Bill Johnson, a Purdue University associate professor of weed science, said farmers who plant Roundup Ready crops and spray Roundup or glyphosate-based herbicides almost exclusively are finding that weeds have developed resistance. It is only a matter of time, Johnson said, before there are so many resistant weeds that the use of glyphosate products would become much less effective in some places.
“We have weeds that have developed resistance, including giant ragweed, which is one of the weeds that drove the adoption of Roundup,” Johnson said. “It’s a pretty major issue in the Eastern Corn Belt. That weed can cause up to 100 percent yield loss.”
So, let me get this straight. You repeatedly subject a living, reproducing organism to a particular environmental stress, and it evolves so as to adapt to that stress? Well, I’ll be.
The best part:
“Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, funded the survey. … [T]he next step is studying the differences among management strategies in grower fields to see which will slow the build-up of glyphosate resistance.”
Fibre scans online
The International Year of Natural Fibres has a great website, and the latest thing on it is a selection of beautiful micrographs of different kinds of fibres, from abaca to yak.
More complex, more interesting, more hopeful
There is simply no way to summarize Willie Smits‘ Ted Talk. It is a masterful description of putting the complexity in an agricultural ecosystem to work to solve the problems of humans and orang-utans. Just astonishing. And so much more intellectually satisfying than a simplified system. Luscious.
Nibbles: Cacao, Profits, Biochar, Biochar, Museum, Fish, Cognac
- Take a tour around the world’s most important cacao germplasm collection.
- “[D]iversified systems were more profitable than monocropping,” but read the whole paper. You have 30 days, free.
- Open source science to measure the impact of biochar.
- “Pro-biochar activists can be as silly as these anti-biochar activists.” Well, duh. But thanks for explaining.
- Gehry builds Panama a Museum of Biodiversity, but seems to forget about agriculture.
- Kano’s fish market takes a hit.
- All about rancio.