Category: Mainstream

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EU puts Trust in Sheep

A new Consortium to study heritage sheep breeds across Europe got off the ground recently with a meeting in Yorkshire, England. The meeting came at the end of a project set up by the European Union, although I confess I have found it very difficult to find out more. Help, if you can.

Heritage breeds are not necessarily rare, but they are often geographically isolated and that can put them at risk. After the most recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in England man thousand Herdwicks were dead in England, and blue tongue threatened the Mergelland sheep of the Netherlands. The project will study threats and how to conserve and make use of sheep breeds. According to Amanda Carson, of the Sheep Trust, who is leading the new European consortium, “the information we gather will also inform policy-makers, nationally and at European level, about the best way to look after our farm animal genetic resources”.

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Wheat “blends” out-perform monocultures

This is astonishing. Luigi said that a dominant meta-narrative in our circles is that selection and breeding displace diversity. Another is that well-bred monocultures improve yields. There’s always been an opposing point of view, most closely associated with the name of Professor Martin Wolfe. Now no less a leviathan than the United States Department of Agriculture seems to agree.

In a ground-breaking experiment, USDA scientist Christina Cowger made mixtures — blends — of two or more wheat varieties and planted them in experimental plots in North Carolina. The results?

The blends outyielded the pure varieties by an average of 2.3 bushels per acre. … That’s a 3.2-percent yield advantage. Blends and pure varieties did not differ in test weight or quality across environments, and blends were either beneficial or neutral with respect to diseases.

Blends are also more stable from year to year, a fact that may be behind farmers taking matters into their own hands: 10 to 15 per cent of the wheat area of Kansas and Washington states was planted to mixtures over the past four years.

I’m looking forward to seeing the full published paper.

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Alternative livelihoods

Do wander over to the latest edition of New Agriculturist, which, among other things, has a great feature giving examples of farmers adopting new crops and other ways of making a living as alternatives to illicit, environmentally damaging or otherwise inappropriate ones.

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Swaziland takes to sorghum … and other crops

It is a mystery to me how a johnny-come-lately like maize in Africa (or for that matter tomato in Italy) can work its way into local consciousness to the extent that people not only consider it as their own but prefer it to things that actually perform better. In one small African country, Swaziland, that may be changing.

“My maize all died in the heat, or it was stunted and the cobs were so small they were only good to give to the cattle. But look at my sorghum! It is doing well,” said Nonhlanhla Thwala, a widow in Lubombo, the country’s eastern region.

The full story is in AllAfrica.com, and it is well worth reading. It seems a shame that it takes a drought and major crop failures to provoke people into reassessing their options and returning to the agricultural biodiversity they abandoned a few generations ago. But at least it is happening.