Category: Organic agriculture

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Looks like we got ourselves a dialectic

Oglio, a third generation farmer eschews modern farming techniques — chemicals, fertilizers, heavy machinery — in favor of a purely natural approach. It is not just ecological, he says, but profitable, and he believes his system can be replicated in starving regions of the globe.

Nearly 5,000 miles (8,000 km) away, in laboratories in St. Louis, Missouri, hundreds of scientists at the world’s biggest seed company, Monsanto, also want to feed the world, only their tools of choice are laser beams and petri dishes.

Reuters anticipates the World Summit on Food Security with the standard oppositional fare.

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Permaculture eco-pioneer on CNN

We’ve blogged about permaculture before, actually several times, and I follow the goings on at the Permaculture Institute of Australia via their RSS feed. They define permaculture as

…the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.

Which makes it sound so sexy I should not have been surprised to see it going mainstream on CNN a few days ago. But I was. Cynical old me. There are a couple of other interesting things — from an agrobiodiversity point of view — in CNN’s Going Green section.

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Nibbles: Teaching vegetables, Truffles, Freakonomics of farmer markets, Crops used for art, Seed storage, Organic farming in Spain, 2050

  • Pamela Akinyi Nyagilo wins prize for teaching Kenyan kids to grow indigenous greens. In 2007, but better late with the news than never.
  • The Great War did for truffles?
  • “Does a local food system truly enhance the integrity of a community, much less make the peasant the equal of a prince and eliminate greed?” And more. And more. And more. And…
  • Crop art, and more. And more.
  • Brassica seeds survive 40 years in a genebank with no loss of viability. Phew.
  • “It seems that, while discount and low-end retailers face more difficulties selling organic products, specialised organic shops and high-end retailers continue to develop beyond expectations.”
  • “As Andy Jarvis, an award-winning crop scientist, puts it: ‘When you look at the graph, under even small average heat rises, the line for maize just goes straight down.’ “