Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Crops for the Future, a new international organisation dedicated to the promotion of neglected and underutilized species, was launched a few days ago.
Crops for the Future has evolved from a union of the International Centre for Underutilised Crops (ICUC) and the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species (GFU). It will be hosted in Malaysia by Bioversity International in a joint venture with the University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus.
Best wishes to all concerned!
More on that drip irrigation thing I Nibbled yesterday. David Zetland, the aquablogger sans pareil, has blogged a bit about this. On the PNAS paper, he had this to say:
Water has to go somewhere, and drip irrigation just controls that flow. Be a good cost-accountant and find out where else it goes. (There are losers and gainers on an individual basis, but society as a whole should just try to maximize overall benefit from water.)
I’m puzzled by “society as a whole”. Is that some overweening society, or just the outcome of individual actions?
An earlier post, in response to an email, revealed that Zetland, like me, had always though that drip would be more “efficient,” but that there are many factors that come into play.
It’s all about cost and benefit. When water is cheaper, it’s not too important to conserve it, but expensive water doesn’t necessarily mean that the “best” irrigation method is the one that uses the least water. (Although drip-irrigated rice uses less water, it also has a lower yield.)
So, it’s complex. Now, there’s a surprise. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some decision-making tool that could tell the grower which system would provide the most crop per drop, taking into account, of course, the cost per drop?
And in related news, Reuters reports that Iraq plans to revive 2.5 million hectares of agricultural land by “sucking out the salt”. I’m not sure I understand the project fully. It seems to involve “pumping out the groundwater beneath the soil over several years”. Then what? Natural rainfall replenishes the groundwater? We shall see, but it sounds like a huge undertaking with no guarantees of success or even a reasonable return.
OK, so irrigation isn’t really about agrobiodiversity, but one can use agricultural biodiversity to take advantage of what water is available, and that’s a good enough reason to post.
Rather than just complaining about how the rest of the natural world fails to give agricultural biodiversity due respect, I decided to bring them all here to see for themselves. My cracking wheeze: host Linnaeus’ Legacy, “A monthly carnival celebrating the diversity of life on this planet, and the methods we use to understand it.” Then, in the onrush of wonderful blog posts about diversity in general, I’ll just slip in a few select agrobiodiversity items to prove that we too have what it takes.
There are many ways to submit posts.
And they don’t have to be your own posts, they can be things that have struck you as interesting and worth sharing.
I plan to publish on Wednesday 10 December, so there’s still time.
With lots of great stuff, from pretty much all over the Plant Kingdom. Enjoy!
On World AIDS Day, it would be nice to be able to point to how agrobiodiversity can help the more than 40 million people living with HIV around the world. Not easy, alas. There’s an FAO strategy-type document from 2003. And what looks like a project from Wageningen University that’s just about to end. But very little else in the way of concrete examples, at least that I could find in the first few pages of a Google search. There was a piece today reviewing the role of nutrition in dealing with HIV/AIDS, but this mainly dealt with supplements. Can this possibly be it?