- Guess what. Cranberry pests prefer certain varieties.
- If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Estimating yield of food crops grown by smallholder farmers from IFPRI.
- CIAT first CG centre to publish peer-reviewed video, on resistance selection. In other news, there are peer-reviewed videos?
- CFTF draws our attention to Jackfruit – Forgotten Kalpavriksha, “a common trope”.
- $3.4 million worth of good news for food security and diversity in the Andes. “Small Andean tuber crops” involved.
- Minor millets star in new film shared by Bioversity.
- Want the Philippines to be self-sufficient in rice? Eat rootcrops. IRRI unavailable for comment.
- Way more than any sensible person will ever want to know about duck and goose semen.
Ecoagriculture reviewed, again
It was over two years ago that we mentioned a meta-meta analysis of ecoagriculture. Since then we’ve had Prof. Olivier de Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, weighing in, among other celebrities. Now David Suzuki, no less, tells us about yet another review, with much the same bottom line:
…our review supports the claim that the solutions to the problems of widespread food insecurity and biodiversity loss need not be mutually exclusive, and that it may be possible to address both using appropriate alternative agricultural practices.
Here I just want to throw something else into the mix. We know from yet another recent meta-analysis that there are recognizable socioeconomic patterns to the distribution of infraspecific crop diversity on farm. A study has just been published which suggests that the number of species cultivated by a traditional society can be predicted by latitude, environmental heterogeneity (mainly altitude), and the commitment of the society to agriculture (as opposed to herding, foraging and exchange). Does this mean there are some intrinsic limits to the level of intra- and inter-specific agrobiodiversity a given agricultural system will support? And if so, what does that mean for ecoagriculture in that region?
Nibbles: Median strips, Vitamin A, Mapping in Kenya, Chaffey, Small farms, Rennell Island coconuts, Sweet potato breeding, Acacia nomenclature, Crop models, Pulque, Fruits
- Planting roadsides with natives, including crop wild relatives. And here comes the database.
- Orange Maize: The Movies.
- VirtualKenya really here. Mother-in-law beside herself.
- Plant Cuttings is out. And all of a sudden I’m in a much better place.
- Small is beautiful, farm edition. And as chance would have it, coffee farm edition. And urban edition.
- Dispute at iconic coconut plantation resolved. Apparently there are some really unique varieties there.
- I say boniato. For the first and last time.
- Acacia on the brink. Easy, tiger. The name, not the genus.
- We’re going to need a better model.
- Pulque comes back. Never knew it had gone away.
- Domesticating fruit trees in Kenya. Something for VirtualKenya?
How to buy on-farm conservation
An item on the website of Conservation Magazine describes how best to buy ecosystem services. It distinguishes “payments for action” from “payments for results”.
Farmers in Europe, it says, are paid to mow their hayfields to create habitat for birds, and get the cash regardless of how many birds use the grasslands. That’s payment for action.
In Cambodia, by contrast, villagers are paid to conserve forests, “but only if visiting birdwatchers see certain unusual species”. Payment for results.
Most current schemes to pay for ecosystem services apparently reward actions, rather than results. But which method actually delivers better results?
In general, “payment by action is favored where there is a clear action” that will clearly benefit biodiversity and is relatively easy to measure, they concluded. So paying to increase wetland habitat for birds known to frequent marshes would make sense.
In contrast, in degraded landscapes, or in places where conservationists aren’t sure which actions will bring the most benefit, it might make more sense to pay for results.
The conclusions emerge not from any kind of field study but from a theoretical model “consisting of one conservation agency, one land manager and one patch of habitat. The model assumed that the land manager wanted to maximize income from the patch. The agency, meanwhile, had a limited budget and wanted to get the biggest biodiversity boost for its buck.”
How to apply this to on-farm conservation of agricultural biodiversity? It’s complex. Research is currently going on at Bioversity and elsewhere, with some nifty approaches that, for example, allow different communities to bid for the payments, establishing a market that economist Adam Drucker says allows you to get more conservation for the same amount of money. He has also been exploring the tensions between economic efficiency and social equity; do members of the community resent some being paid more than others for the “same” conservation. A peer-reviewed journal has accepted a paper for publication; we’ll bring you news of an “easier” version of the story when we have it.
Nibbles: G20, Chickens, Yucca flowers
- Advice to the G20: “hunger is neither the result of demographic problems nor just the result of a mismatch between supply and demand”.
- Let there be chickens! Picture goodness from National Geographic.
- How to cook yucca flowers. And eat them, obviously.