- Science: Biodiversity is good even for biofuels.
- Science: Lack of annual diversity is bad for no-till maize (corn).
- Science: “Dead” bananas can still transmit banana bunchy top virus BBTV.
- Science: Potential biological control identified for coffee berry borer. (Eeeyew warning.)
- Art: Biological control (Lilioceris near impressa) of air potato (Dioscorea bulbifera). (Gorgeousness warning.)
- Science: Farmers brought farming to Britain.
- Science and art: A rose is a rose is a rose.
- Science: Black-eyed peas in Dakar gig.
Nibbles: Potatoes, beef, lamb, bull
- Want potato diversity? In the US? Tom Wagner’s your man.
- I should do more than nibble Gary’s insightful views on extremism, especially in relation to grass-fed beef and a bit of biochar. But hey, it’s Sunday.
- George Orwell contemplates smoking mutton. Jeremy asks: “Can anyone tell me more about acatie, from the Savoie?”
- The Scientist Gardener dives into bull semen. Love that second footnote!
Nibbles: School gardens, Nabhan, Reforestation, Swine flu, Boar, Nutrinomics, Medieval sheep, Market, Acacia, Livestock breeds, Bees, Buffalo breeding, Quinoa
- Resource list for setting up a school garden. Take that, Flanagan.
- Gary “Eco-gastronaut” Nabhan goes viral.
- Smithsonian goes native. Trees, that is.
- GRAIN video delves into origin of H1N1.
- There are boar farms of England?
- Nutrition advice needs to take genetics into account.
- Tracing the changing morphology of British post-medieval sheep. Well, someone has to do it.
- Thai floating market. A tourist trap, I know. But photogenic.
- Kew’s plant of the day is gum arabic. Wait, Kew has a plant of the day? Is there no end to their ingenuity?
- And GlobalDiv has a Breed of the Month. BTW, the same source has a thing on the XVIII Plant and Animal Genome Conference (Jan. 2010).
- Diverse diet for healthier bees, says BBC
- Breeding bovines in Asia.
- Cursed quinoa.
Evil locavore Alice Walters destroys California education
When is it a bad idea for children to play around in school gardens?
This notion—that it is agreeably possible to do good (school gardens!) and live well (guinea hens!)—bears the hallmark of contemporary progressivism, a kind of win-win, “let them eat tarte tatin” approach to the world and one’s place in it that is prompting an improbable alliance of school reformers, volunteers, movie stars, politicians’ wives, and agricultural concerns (the California Fertilizer Foundation is a big friend of school gardens) to insert its values into the schools.
A lot of plants, not much meat and maximum variety
The Oxford Real Farming Conference – January 5th 2010
A guest post from our friend Richard Sanders.
Every year in early January “the establishment” of British agriculture gathers in Oxford for the Oxford Farming Conference; two days of debate on their selection of the farming issues of the day. This year the massed ranks of land agents, company agronomists, financial advisers, supermarket buyers, grain traders (and some farmers) busied themselves with debate on the retirement age of farmers and market prices in a global economy.
Frustrated at the lack of engagement with the true failings of modern agriculture, a fringe event launched this year — The Oxford Real Farming Conference. Its organisers, including biologist and writer Colin Tudge and journalist Graham Harvey, are convinced that the Earth’s natural resources are easily able to provide a good, healthy diet for everyone living on the planet today — and everyone likely to be living on it 50 years from now and beyond. All it will take, they say, is an agriculture based on principles of sound biology rather than economic dogma.
“Current farming methods are clearly failing. They are over-dependent on fossil fuels; they damage soils and deplete scarce water resources; they degrade everyday foods; they reduce biodiversity and squander precious wildlife; they pollute our global environment. They are part of a global food system that is at the mercy of speculators and is every bit as precarious as the world banking system,” says Colin Tudge.
“Quite simply, high-input, industrial agriculture is incapable of reform. Rather than feed people, its aim is to serve the interests of global chemical, trading and investment corporations. Far from creating a secure supply of high-quality food, today’s agribusiness can be counted on to obstruct progress.”
As an alternative, the conference heard Professor Martin Wolfe of the Organic Research Centre extol the sustainable virtues of agro-forestry and composite cross populations of cereals over what has become “traditional” mono-cropping.
The call went out for the abandonment of energy-dependent nitrogen fertilisers; the replacement of rampant resource depletion with farming methods that work with rather than against eco-systems; and an end to the steady rationalisation and concentration of power in food processing and distribution.
“Feeding people is easy,” says Colin Tudge. “We must move to a recipe of a lot of plants, not much meat, maximum variety.”
By accident (or design?) the conference was held in the very same room (The Old Library of the University Church) that witnessed the inaugural meeting of the British aid agency Oxfam in 1942. That move was triggered by the need to supply food to starving women and children in German-occupied Greece. Auspicious or what?