- The joy of soy.
- Earliest known domestic horses.
- More than anyone could possibly want to know about biochar and biodiversity (Part III).
- Sorghum difference yield map, see how they grow.
- Mathilda on ensete in highland Ethiopia.
AIDS experts recognize importance of diet, apparently
You may remember a little discussion about agrobiodiversity and AIDS that we had here some time ago. Basically, I was wondering why there weren’t more biodiversity-based interventions to support people living with HIV/AIDS. Well, our friend Arwen Bailey now informs us that this came up at a recent seminar given by Dr Tim Johns at Bioversity International HQ in Rome, and he said that at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico last August, there was “a feeling that clinical interventions have gone as far as they can go without addressing the environment and diets of affected people.” Apparently the session on biodiversity and AIDS was standing room only. Arwen found a couple of abstracts on the topic on the programme. Thanks, Arwen.
Millennial beans
Nice enough beans, 1 but is the story circulating about them really true?
The story of Anasazi beans varies, depending on who is telling it. In popular mythology, the beans were uncovered by an anthropologist, who discovered a 1,500 year old tightly sealed jar of the beans at a dig in New Mexico. Some of the beans germinated, and the new variety of bean entered cultivation again.
I tried to track the story down, and the closest I got to paydirt, I think, was a passage in Beans: A History by Ken Albala. But even that is pretty vague really. Archaeologists from UCLA somewhere in the midwest in the 1980s, or maybe 1950s, uncover a clay pot sealed with pine tar which they carbon date to 500 BCE. Some of the beans sprout and an intrepid businessman markets them. Yeah, right. To go back to the source of the previous quote:
Since most botanists agree that most beans are unable to germinate after approximately 50 years, it is more probable that the beans remained in constant cultivation in the Southwest, probably in Native American gardens, and that they were picked up by companies looking for new “boutique beans.”
There are plenty of companies marketing Anasazi beans now. But actually it is not impossible for legume seeds to keep their viability for more than 50 years — that’s what genebanks are for. And the dry, relatively cool conditions of an Arizona cave might just be good enough to ensure the survival of a few beans for centuries.
Mautam!
Once every 48 years, forests of the bamboo known as Melocanna baccifera go into exuberant flower in parts of northeast India. And then, like clockwork, the event is invariably followed by a plague of black rats that spring from nowhere to spread destruction and famine in their wake. For the first time on film, NOVA and National Geographic capture this massive rat population explosion in the kind of vivid detail not possible in 1959, when the last invasion occurred.
Sounds like a must-watch. Via.
Blooming desert
The picture, from Google Earth, shows a bit of Sudan in December 2003. The white line is 1 km long. I think that’s standing water just above the line, with quite large trees north of the water. How they got there made my jaw drop.
John Greenfield 2 was working on a “Savannah Development Project” almost 40 years ago. The project required a D6 Caterpillar bulldozer to make airstrips for the project’s plane. In between times, John put the bulldozer to other uses:
I constructed a massive absorption bank across a dry Wadi in order to show the Sudanese, the importance of moisture conservation. I remember when I was building this bank thinking, you will be able to see this from the air.
And you surely can! As John points out, one of the big problems with desert soils is that they crust over, so that any rain that does fall runs off and does not penetrate. Slow the flow down, with any kind of barrier on a contour, and the water goes into the soil. John’s idea was for “linear farms” established behind vetiver hedges.
Once you have collected runoff from a wadi, and let it soak in to the soil you can grow some very useful crops that would have been impossible without the moisture conservation. The biggest problem with deserts is uncontrolled runoff – hence my idea of ‘Linear farms’ behind vetiver hedges – a farm 10m wide X 1000m along the hedge equals 1 ha. That is a hectare of land that would produce well, as opposed to the thousands of hectares of little farms producing a few survivors of what was planted.
When I worked in this desert, I use to visit these little farms and talk with the farmers ( who made their money out of collecting Gum Arabic, and were bloody well robbed) We would look at their ‘farm’ and there would be a dozen or so stalks of sorghum waving in the breeze and I would ask why they thought those plants grew well when the rest failed – no idea – on closer inspection of the surviving individuals, they were all, without exception, growing in hollows in the field that the runoff had collected in. Now, I said, if we extended these ‘hollows’ around the contour or across the slope (made contour furrows) then all the seed would flourish. And doing just that enabled me to produce the heaviest crops of Sorghum this area had ever seen.
Did anything ever become of the idea? I doubt it, or we would surely have heard about it. But it seems on the face of it a brilliant technique for using agrobiodiversity to enable farmers to grow more agricultural biodiversity.
And if you want to see for yourself, point GE at 13 05’22.52â€N 30 14’09.07â€E