Speaking of “special products” from agricultural biodiversity, check this out.
Making grains relevant
The low-carb craze of a few years back has spoiled the nutritional reputation of cereal grains, and it is up to the industry to get people eating them again. So said Francesco Pantò of the pasta giant Barilla yesterday at the first European congress of the American Association of Cereal Chemists International (AACCI), in Montpellier. He suggested five ways to do that:
- develop new durum wheat varieties and special products that can differentiate them, as for grapes and wine
- market grains as mainstream and everyday products
- use innovative technology to incorporate new grains into familiar products
- aim for convenience, and promote the goodness of cereals and fiber
- add extra components to cereal products in order to make them into a more complete meal
The first of these will of course be particularly welcome by those of us interested in agricultural biodiversity, and I wonder whether pseudocereals like buckwheat and quinoa might also find a place under the third point.
Organic agriculture
FAO has a paper out on organic agriculture, as part of the International Conference on Organic Agriculture and Food Security, going on in Rome as I type. Here’s a quote:
The strongest feature of organic agriculture is its reliance on fossil-fuel independent and locally-available production assets; working with natural processes increases cost-effectiveness and resilience of agro-ecosystems to climatic stress. By managing biodiversity in time (rotations) and space (mixed cropping), organic farmers use their labour and environmental services to intensify production in a sustainable way.
Those are some of the strengths, and very significant they are too. An often-quoted weakness of organic agriculture, however, is that yields are often lower than what you’d expect from “conventional” agriculture. But why? Well, according to a recent study using wheat as a model, part of the reason is that the varieties used are poorly adapted to the particular conditions of organic agriculture: “increasing yield in organic systems through breeding will require direct selection within organic systems rather than indirect selection in conventional systems… With crop cultivars bred in and adapted to the unique conditions inherent in organic systems, organic agriculture will be better able to realize its full potential as a high-yielding alternative to conventional agriculture.”
A good life grown on coconuts
The latest update from COGENT — the International Coconut Genetic Resources Network — is online in the Coconut Google Group. It traces some of the activities of the Kamnoedtone family in Thailand, who have used coconut diversity to improve their lives considerably. The Google group is billed as an “Information exchange for the coconut palm Cocos nucifera” and COGENT is just one of many users. Apologies for my error earlier.
Tiger wine
Here’s an interesting way of adding value to an agricultural product: take rice, make rice wine, then soak tiger carcasses in it. Not everyone approves.