- The Arid Lands Information Network has published a briefing on Climate change and the threat to African food security.
- Free Seeds, Not Free Beer. A paper on intellectual property rights. Luigi asks: Why not both?
- Urban farming around the world, a slideshow. No wonder Back40 thinks its all hobby or hack.
- More urban farms in the US. Enough already!
- See the spud behind the Irish Potato Famine. Today. In Guelph. That’s Canada.
- Napier Stunt Disease threat to Ugandan milk production.
- The Ecosystems Map of the Northern and Central Andes is out.
Nibbles: Biofuels, Nuts, Homegardens, Urban Ag, Fruit
- Maized and confused. The Economist looks at ethanol. Jeremy says: great headline.
- Would Cassava be any better? The post doesn’t even consider the question.
- Is it nuts to grow almonds in California and ship them to Vietnam for processing and packaging?
- This project aims to better understand the levels of agrobiodiversity found in homegardens. Yes, but in the UK?
- [A] gold mine of useful resources for city farmers.
- … a visionary pomologist, a fruit scientist, a species of practical rapturist … Wow!
Airport ag
Luigi shared links to two recent pieces about food, conservation and airports. The first is an audio slideshow of urban gardeners who make use of land owned by the airport in St Louis, Missouri. I found it a bit fluffy — and we don’t hear directly from any of the gardeners — but there’s a place for fluff. The big question: do the gardens attract birds that might pose a threat to jets?
Birdstrike is not a problem for the other, an article about how the endangered El Segundo Blue Butterfly has made a comeback at Los Angeles airport thanks to a conservation project that hinged on providing the butterfly with its sole food plant, seacliff buckwheat (Eriogonum parviflorum). A buckwheat, eh? So, is it edible? I can’t find any evidence that it is. Or that it isn’t.
Detroit, Cuba, and you
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Forget Cuba, we’ve got Detroit
A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.
Cost per calorie should figure in that definition too; either way, here’s a dream of an idea for greening Detroit, symbol of all that is urban decay in the US. It could happen, I suppose. But what are they going to grow during those Michigan winters?
Mark Dowie, the article’s author, “lives on an island floating in the Pacific” it says here, but I’m sure he has researched the topic as thoroughly as he does all his articles and will be moving to Motor City any day now.