Category: Nutrition

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Smaller farms, more crop diversity, more nutrients, mainly

There’s a follow-up to that Environment Reports website on farm size and nutrient production that we blogged about a couple of weeks back. The data come mainly (though not exclusively) from a blockbuster inaugural Lancet Planetary Health article.

The new website explores farm size variation among different regions of the world through some great imagery. But it also highlights one aspect of the paper that I didn’t mention in the previous post: crop diversity on farm. Here’s the relevant figure (the paper’s figure 5), mapping how many different types of crops are produced in a pixel and how evenly these different types are distributed (the Shannon diversity index, H).

Here’s what the authors have to say about diversity and nutrient production (my emphasis).

…combining the diversity measures with spatially explicit plot sizes, which are highly correlated with farm size, shows that agricultural diversity (H) decreases as plot size increases (p<0·0001; appendix). In particular, areas with small and medium farms (≤50 ha) have larger diversity than do larger scale farms. These differences also translate into differences in nutrient production (figure 6). On a global level, areas with higher diversity of food commodities (higher H) produce more micronutrients than do areas with less diversity. This effect is particularly noticeable in places such as China, sub-Saharan Africa, east Asia Pacific, and west Asia and north Africa. In contrast with North America, in Europe, although production comes mostly from medium and large farms, it is not farm size, but the diversity of production that drives nutrient production in this region.

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Brainfood: Cannabis roundup, Citrus genomes, Mapping Africa, Maize diversity, Qat diversity, Language diversity, Apple taste, Coconut diversity, Napier grass review, Rangeland management, Chinese goats, Arabica evaluation, Bangladeshi chickens, Seed endophytes

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Nibbles: Aeroponic yams, Ancient crops, Kumara, Informal food vendors, Foxy, Salumi, Corn whiskey, Doomed cassava

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Everything about size

Whizz-bang websites in support of data-dense papers seem to be all the rage.

Remember “Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis,” published in the inaugural The Lancet Planetary Health a couple of weeks back? We included it in Brainfood, and linked to an article by Jess Fanzo which summarizes the main findings. This is probably the money quote:

Both small and large farms play important roles in ensuring we have enough food that is diverse and nutrient-rich. While industrialised agriculture suggests domination of food systems, smallholder farms play a substantial role in maintaining the genetic diversity of our food supply, which results in both benefits and risk reductions against nutritional deficiencies, ecosystem degradation, and climate change. Herrero and colleagues argue that if we want to ensure that the global food supply remains diverse and generates a rich array of nutrients for human health, farm landscapes must also be diverse and serve multiple purposes.

Well, there’s also a graphics-rich website now, “Small Farms: Stewards of Global Nutrition?” The infographic at the left here puts it in the proverbial nutshell (click to embiggen).

But what you really want to know is on what kinds of farms are grown those Canadian and Indian peas we talked about yesterday in connection with other fancy websites. Well, unfortunately, the data are only available for “pulses” here, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, those are grown mainly on large(ish) farms (blue) in North America, and small(ish) farms (orange) in South Asia. Each square is 1% of global production.

You can get similar breakdowns for different food groups (cereals, oils, etc.), and for a bunch of different nutrients: Calcium, Calories, Folate, Iron, Protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin B12, and Zinc. For all of these last you can also see global maps of nutritional yields, or “the number of people who can meet their nutritional needs from all of the crops, livestock, and fish grown in an area.” Here’s the one for Vitamin A.

Which I’m sure will be of use in targeting the promotion of homegardening, say, or the roll-out of things like orange sweet potatoes. There is Biofortification Priority Index already, but only at a fairly coarse, country level. As far as I know, anyway.

Of course, those countries could always import sweet potatoes…

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Nibbles: ICARDA genebank, Mexican honeys, NWFP news, Schisandra, Swimming camels, Barley genome, Silly video, Tasty breeders, Tall maize, Praying for the prairie, Rosaceous breeding, Millet fair, Sesame entrepreneurs, European AnGR, Thai gardens, Apple resistance, Native Californians

  • Latest on the ICARDA genebank from the author of The Profit of the Earth.
  • Honey diversity in Mexico.
  • Speaking of which, did we already point to the new, improved Non-wood Forest Products Newsletter?
  • The schisandra berry is apparently helping save the panda. Yeah, I never heard of it either, but more power to its elbow.
  • Make your day better by looking at pictures of aquatic camels.
  • Oh, here we go, cue the endless stream of stories about how genomics will save beer.
  • “In the last century, 94% of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared.” No, they bloody haven’t. Only linking to this for completeness.
  • Breeders get into flavour. Because celebrity chefs.
  • That’s one tall maize plant. No, but really tall.
  • The Great Plains are in Great Trouble: “Hundreds of species call the prairie home… A cornfield, on the other hand, is a field of corn.”
  • A project dedicated to the genetic improvement of US rosaceous crops. Love that word. Rosaceous.
  • Eat those millets!
  • Sesame opens doors in Tanzania. See what I did there?
  • Interview on conserving Europe’s livestock diversity.
  • WorldVeg empowers women through gardening. I know how they feel. Well, kinda.
  • Want a Forbidden Apple? You know you do. #resist
  • “Accustomed to seeing crops planted in straight rows featuring one or a few different varieties, Muir and his European predecessors were not prepared to recognize this subtler form of horticulture. And so they viewed California Indians as lazily gathering the fat of a landscape they had hardly touched.”