- Tracing Canary Island potatoes back to the Andes.
- Lupin diversity, all in one handy place.
- Bangladeshi women are grafting away.
- Wanna take a survey of “lessons learned about ways and means to conserve and use genetic diversity to build resilience to climate change in food and agriculture systems“? Uhm.
- Maybe they should survey this guy.
- Kew takes on the grasspea.
- I have my freedom but I don’t have much time…
- FAO spots a win-win-win in school feeding programme linked to family farms.
Nibbles: Superweeds, Old spices, Companies and nutrition, Bananas and cacao, Coffee pix, Potato restaurant, Millet processing, Aussie social herbarium, Rockefeller Story, Apple nutrition, And a bottle of rum…
- Those who like that sort of thing will no doubt enjoy this discussion at Biofortified of that recent paper about a herbicide resistance transgene possibly giving a fitness advantage to weeds. And more.
- As for me, I’d rather read about Neolithic spices. Or beer.
- Some food companies more committed to nutrition than others shock. But good to have the data.
- Bananas to the rescue in cacao plantations. If I had the willpower I’d try to mash it up with the previous thing. Anyway, coffee next?
- Eating more spuds in the Village. Eating more millets in the village.
- Australian National Herbarium gets a Facebook page.
- The history of the Rockefeller Foundation’s agriculture work. That would include the Green Revolution.
- Really confused Telegraph piece on heirloom and/or organic apples.
- I guess I missed National Rum Day. But I’m nevertheless glad that it exists.
Nibbles: Nigerian NUS, Disappearing diverse farms, Malnutrition
- Canada invests $2.9m in “under-utilised Nigerian Vegetables,” report fails to say which ones.
- Where did all the diverse farms go? Katherine McDonald reveals all.
- Excellent argie-bargie over child nutrition in India.
Nibbles: Indigenous people, Lentil day, Competition, Kibera kale, Afghan ag fan
- Friday was International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. Let one post on Indigenous Peoples and the Diversity of Food represent them all. (But isn’t that coffee in the photo?)
- And yesterday was 23 Thermidor, AKA Lentil Day, in the French Republican Calendar. In other news, “Every day of the French Republican Calendar was associated with a different plant, animal, agricultural tool, etc., both to replace the custom of saints’ days and to celebrate the agricultural and natural world.”
- Today brings notice of a contest to “showcase projects from around the globe that have bridged gaps between agriculture, food security, and nutrition”. Details from Secure Nutrition.
- Growing greens — even exotic kale — in Kibera, Nairobi, would surely be a worthy winner.
- Not so sure about the photo story of Combat farming in Afghanistan, (via Metafilter) which seems to be oblivious to the number one cash crop in those parts.
A diverse look at productivity
Take a look at the graphic up there and tell me what you see? If you’re anything like me, you’ll be a bit surprised. In this kind of “heat map” green is usually good and red is usually bad, but what on Earth is good across much of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and bad just about everywhere else?
Yield — if you think about it properly.
A recent paper by Emily Cassidy and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota ((Emily S Cassidy, Paul C West, James S Gerber, & Jonathan A Foley (2013). Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare Environmental Research Letters DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015)) got a lot of press recently focused on the claim that feeding more people a nutritionally sound diet would be a lot easier if we just ate lower on the food chain. That’s an argument that lots of people have made, backed up to varying degrees with good numbers. What’s different this time is that the numbers are a lot more rigorous and, in my opinion, a lot more accessible. That map above, for example, shows the calories delivered to the food system per calorie produced. In other words, crudely, the amount of human food as opposed to animal feed.
Obvious, when you think about it, that the number of people fed per hectare is surely a better measure of agricultural productivity than the simple yield. That’s what underpins the money quote:
We find that, given the current mix of crop uses, growing food exclusively for direct human consumption could, in principle, increase available food calories by as much as 70%, which could feed an additional 4 billion people (more than the projected 2–3 billion people arriving through population growth). Even small shifts in our allocation of crops to animal feed and biofuels could significantly increase global food availability, and could be an instrumental tool in meeting the challenges of ensuring global food security.
There are other eye-opening graphics in the paper, for example a ranking of the major crops based on calories delivered to the food system versus calories lost. As you can imagine, maize doesn’t do well at all. Nor does barley, because so much goes to feed. I highly recommend taking a look at the full paper, which is freely available.
Cassidy et al. are decidedly not calling for everyone to go vegan. For a start, that would leave a lot of grass and other forages uneaten and a lot of nutritional holes in the diet of many people. They are suggesting that the “problem” of feeding future global population may be easier to solve than currently imagined, if people shift their diet. The problem of how to help people shift their diet, they don’t address.