Participatory research and on-farm management of agricultural biodiversity in Europe, by Michel Pimbert, looks like an interesting read. So, in a different way, does the EU biodiversity strategy to 2020. What is not so great is that, at first sight, there doesn’t seem to be much of the former in the latter. But let me get back to you when I’ve gone through both in more detail.
Nibbles: Nabhan, Tilapia, Crowdsourcing taxonomy, Drought, Bees
- Gary Nabhan on the West Bank wall.
- Tilapia not so bad after all?
- Yet another example of crowdsourcing in science.
- Yet another approach to breeding for (mild) drought tolerance.
- Yet another reason why natural history collections are so important.
Diverse lawns are smarter lawns
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the demise of the Great American Lawn. Or at least its metamorphosis into something a little more sustainable. Even the White House lawn is not immune to re-development. But a recent post on the Native Plants mailing list of the Plant Conservation Alliance points to what may be the beginnings of a backlash. Here’s what Mark Simmons had to say in response to an article in the Star Tribune entitled Goodbye to Grass (Mark’s comments are reproduced here with his permission):
I really like my lawn – my low maintenance, species-rich, drought-adapted native lawn.
While I agree that lawns can be replaced with alternative vegetation, I think that the lawn is entitled to a place in the American landscape and we should be careful of following the current fashion of demonizing turf. It’s not the lawn that’s the problem is how lawns are manufactured. We take a usually single non-native species that’s been bred to rely on a life-support system of water, fertilizer, pesticides herbicides, and a crazy mowing regimen. If you look at native short grasslands around the world its clear that, in contrast, they are low nutrient, species-rich, systems which are at ecological quasi-equilibrium usually maintained by grazing and or fire. Here at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center we adopted an ecological approach to turf by testing different mixes of native turf grasses and against a commonly-used non-native turf lawn species (bermudagrass) and measured performance. The multispecies native mix needs less mowing, had less weeds and was a denser, finer (better looking) turf. The results were just published in the journal Ecological Engineering. Sure it can go drought-dormant and brown in summer if it’s not watered. But if that may be an acceptable alternative to no lawn at all.
My young children can’t play baseball in gravel and agaves. And I want to sink a beer on a Saturday evening bare foot in soft, cool turf. Let’s keep doing lawns, just do them smart.
Nibbles: Fruit-tree fundraiser, Bangladesh seed crisis, Mead, Early farmers, Fruit genebank
- Bioversity promotes a fund-raiser for forgotten fruit trees.
- Seed crisis in Bangladesh. It’s complicated. Really complicated.
- Belatedly, mirthful report on mead.
- “…during the advent of agriculture … early farmers may have at first come together in communal activities, prior to congregating in villages.”
- USDA’s fruit genebank at Corvallis in the news.
How to give agrobiodiversity an even break
Our friends at Bioversity have meta-done it again. After a milestone contribution a few years ago on the patterns of landrace diversity in farmers’ fields, now arrives a monumental review of the kinds of things that can be done to keep it there. 1 It comes as part of a special issue of Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences entitled “Towards a More Sustainable Agriculture.”
It’s a long and complex article and impossible to do full justice to here, but the motivation behind it is simple enough: “to understand better the nature and contribution of traditional varieties to the production strategies of rural communities … and the ways in which they are maintained and managed.” That landraces still make such a contribution, despite expectations to the contrary in many quarters, 2 is undeniable. As the authors admit, there is a lively ongoing debate about whether this can, or indeed should, continue. The superior adaptation of landraces to marginal conditions, the stability of their performance over time, the socio-economic conditions of small-scale farmers, and growing concerns about reducing agriculture’s dependence on inputs would all seem to point to a continuing, significant role in livelihoods strategies, at least in specific situations. But if so, why do they need help, as the authors also concede?
The problem is that lots of external factors work against landraces being all they can be, from dysfunctional seed systems to short-termist government policies. The diagram in Fig. 1 makes this clear (clearer still if you click on it):
The paper is really about what can be done to make it a more even playing field for landraces, by overcoming these multitudinous constraints. To that end its centrepiece, Table 1, is a huge list of the sorts of specific actions that have been undertaken around the world over the years in support of landrace management on farm.
So, for example, re-introducing landraces from a genebank (be it international or community), based on local adaptation and farmer preferences, would address constraints 1a and 2a, which have to do with the lack of sufficient planting material. Getting breeding programmes to use more landraces and farmer selections would be great for 2d, 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d, 4a, 4b and 4c (which incidentally seems pretty good value for money). Enabling farmer groups to develop a marketing strategy for landrace products would take care of 3a, 4a and 4c. And so on, and on, for 16 pages. The list of potential interventions is nothing if not exhaustive, and each is in turn exhaustively documented with references.
This is, like the previous review, a tour-de-force. If anything is missing from the discussion, it is perhaps a sense of what the best bets might be. That is, having identified a particular constraint or set of constraints, what are the things that are likely to be most effective in different contexts, for different crops? For that, a rearrangement of Table 1 summarizing and prioritizing interventions for each constraint would have been a useful start. Thus, if you find specific constraint X, you can do A, B and C, and B is what has worked best in the past in similar situations. Another area that could have been explored in more detail is how interventions work — or fail to work — when implemented together. But all this would be no more that tinkering with the masses of data that have been put together, which is perhaps already going on in Bioversity’s Maccarese eyrie.
The next major analytical step, surely, is to work out, or document if the information is already available, what these interventions actually cost. That would allow some calculation of possible returns on investment. Whether, and to what extent, any of the things that are so comprehensively described in this paper are ever done on a large scale in support of landrace conservation and use on farm will probably in the end be down to that. After all, those pushing the “alternatives” have already done their sums.