- “Sangeeta also runs a farm-field school to teach farmers about vermin-compost, mushroom farming, bee keeping and dairy farming.”
- For the majority of Afghan farmers and sharecroppers, poppy cultivation is no less than a desperate survival strategy.
- “… human fondness for alcohol comes from our past seeking of energy rich plants.”
- Geoff Tansey, one of the authors, talks about the patenting of life at the launch of the IDRC book The Future Control of Food.
Nibbles: Food, Organic, Halophyte, Aromatic, Botanical garden, Coffee, Verroa mite, Pastoralists
- What’s good here? I love globalization.
- An organic oasis in Egypt.
- Today’s crop of the future: Salicornia.
- English lavender?
- Florida botanical garden collects plants threatened by climate change.
- “Los Delirios is a blend of Caturra, Typica, and Bourbon beans grown near Esteli, Nicaragua.”
- Fungus to help honey bees fight mites.
- “During our grandfathers’ time there were different types of grasses here, some for the cows and others for the goats and sheep. Now there’s no grass, the land has become barren.”
Sack gardens
There’s a lively discussion on “sack gardens” going on at FSN Forum. ((That’s the Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition Policies and Strategies.)) People have written in with their experiences in refugee camps in Kenya, HIV/AIDS households in South Africa, and Gaza province in Mozambique. I guess sack gardens could be considered a variant of the keyhole gardens we have posted about a couple of times already. In fact, there’s a whole typology of container urban gardening. As coincidence would have it, allAfrica had a piece a couple of weeks ago on the use of sacks to grow vegetables in the Kibera slum of Nairobi after the recent election violence. Interestingly, only kale and spinach are mentioned. I bet local vegetables would grow even better under these conditions.
What’s a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?
I heard an interesting programme on the BBC World Service last night about how middle class Chicagoans are buying shares in nearby farms. The farmers get money up front from them, rather than from banks who wouldn’t give them anyway, and the urbanites can hang out in a rustic setting and have fresh produce from a trusted source delivered weekly. Unfortunately, I can’t find the piece on the BBC website. However, there’s a NY Times article from a couple of weeks back that will do just as well. ((It’s also in the International Herald Tribune if you don’t like registering at the Times.)) The article says that this
… concept was imported from Europe and Asia in the 1980s as an alternative marketing and financing arrangement to help combat the often prohibitive costs of small-scale farming.
Here’s one of the shareholders, retired computer consultant Steve Trisko, who likes weeding beets and tending tomatoes:
We decided that it’s in our interest to have a small farm succeed and have them be able to have a sustainable farm producing good food.
Is this part of the back-to-the-future, small-is-beautiful vibe Jeremy was talking up a few posts back?
Nibbles: Bees, Training, Fertilizers, Darfur, Tourism, Vinegar, Gardens
- Commercial bees infecting wild ones.
- Ag graduates put to work in Punjab.
- Humanure. You heard me.
- Agricultural rehabilitation in Darfur.
- “Increasing farm yield should not just be aimed to reduce the local dependency on imported food items as much as it should be tied in to the tourism industry.”
- “One day he said he wanted to have a vinegar festival.”
- Edible landscaping.
- Peach mojito. Yummie.