Category: Mainstream

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BBC’s Farm Swap is online

That BBC radio documentary about farmers trying to learn from each other is out at last.

In Farm Swap, Mike Gallagher meets two farmers who are working outside their own countries.

They are both prepared to experience a new environment but for very different reasons.

You can listen online or download a podcast.

In part one Pedro, an idealistic young Ecuadorian farmer, visits Hawaii…

During his 4 month visit to Hawaii, Pedro visits a coffee plantation and learns how to encourage sustainable agriculture.

But as well as discovering new farming techniques and sharing experiences to take back to Ecuador, what can Pedro teach Hawaiian farmers in return?

As I said before, I think farmer-to-farmer exchanges are potentially a great way to learn. I’ll be tuning in.

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Cats and dogs and maize: A Darwinian view

The Rough Guide To Evolution lists the entire content (with linky goodness) of the current early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the USA. As Mark Pallen notes, it “is chock full of articles on evolution from a recent colloquium”. Two that we’ll be reading over the weekend are:

  1. From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication, and
  2. Tracking footprints of maize domestication and evidence for a massive selective sweep on chromosome 10.

Who says we don’t know how to have fun round here?

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Using local resources to cope with high food prices

The 34th session of the Committee on World Food Security at FAO Headquarters in October 2008 included a side event of the Standing Committee on Nutrition on the Impact of high food prices on nutrition. Pablo Eyzaguirre, Senior Scientist, Bioversity International gave a presentation entitled, Coping with high food prices: making better use of local food sources.

Then he was interviewed. Well worth watching. Thanks, Arwen and Facebook.

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Trading farming places

The BBC World Service has a new radio documentary out soon called “Farm Swap.” The conceit is you take a farmer and you plonk him or her into a completely different farming situation. An Ecuadorian organic farmer goes to Hawaii and an English potato farmer goes to Eastern Europe, judging from the brief on-air adverts, but there are no details at all on the website yet. I’m not sure if this is a one-off or a series, but I hope the latter, as it sounds like fun. Especially if subsistence farmers are included, say maize farmers in Kenya and Mexico exchanging experiences, or coconut farmers in India and Ghana. Not enough of that goes on, I think. It would also be nice to see what a particular British allotment gardener would do in another milieu.