Want proof that sustainable agriculture is firmly on the radar of the mainstream press? Newsweek has a piece this week on how Andean potato farmers are adapting to climate change. While Time sings an ode to the American “urban agricultural boom.”
BBC takes on urban agriculture
The BBC’s One Planet programme visits Hyderabad to talk to urban vegetable growers and buffalo keepers. This seems to be part of a series. A previous programme visited Kampala. The podcasts are here. But it’s weird. I can’t find a decent, detailed description of the programme(s) online, much less a place to get transcripts. That can’t be right.
Sack gardens
There’s a lively discussion on “sack gardens” going on at FSN Forum. 1 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.
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.
Nibbles: Funding, Grains, Wildflowers, AVRDC, Cloning, Salinity, Education, Sheep dogs, Swans, Writing, Fisheries, Big ag
- Silver lining: IRRI funding up 20% so far this year.
- Foodie discovers diversity: Amaranth, Himalayan Red Rice, Teff, Farro, Triticale, Sorghum … How have I never tried any of these?
- Texans save wildflower seeds.
- “We are not trying to use vegetables as a substitute for food, but rather as an addition to the food basket, to help farmers become better nourished and grow out of poverty.”
- Jurassic Park video.
- Olive varieties differ in response to irrigation with saline water.
- BBC’s One Planet podcast on urban agriculture in Kampala.
- St Kitts kids learn about sweet potato diversity. From the Taiwanese.
- Even in the struggle between shepherd and wolf the issue is uncertain.
- Agricultural biodiversity rituals corner: swan upping. Ah, swan terrine.
- A roundup of Britain’s nature writers. A sort of nature writer upping, I guess.
- Remember that catfish post a couple days back? This completes the trifecta.
- “…the crop from ground, washed, packed and stacked in supermarket-ready trays in just six minutes.”