New disease alert: citrus greening is spreading across the US.
The geography of rice
Robert Hijmans has a great new global map of rice cultivation out. Robert is at IRRI now, hence his current preoccupation with rice, but he’s done the same thing for several other crops, and of course there are his cool cartograms too. I guess it is his map that underlies the figures of the potential impact of climate change.
Of course, this is a snapshot. How cultivation of a crop changes over time is difficult to capture in a single image, but there’s a map which does a pretty good job for maize.
Millet beer froths up
A technological innovation revives traditional home brew in Uganda.
Arecanut troubles
Indian betel nut farmers beaten down.
Up in smoke
A paper in Forest Ecology and Management describes how high-quality “briar root” smoking pipes are made from the lignotuber — a starchy swelling on underground stems or roots — of the tree heath, Erica arborea. The best lignotubers, and therefore the best pipes, come from the Peloritani Mountains of NE Sicily. Unfortunately, current management practices — which discourage “grub-felling” and use for pipe-making and charcoal production — have ironically resulted in an increasing frequency and severity of fires. The authors suggest that the cultural and environmental roles of tree heath in Sicily need to be seen as two sides of the same coin and not as being in opposition. What’s happening with cork is another example of the same thing.