We’re back

There may be a big blank space above. It ought to be a fancy link to a video of Levon Helm singing Poor Old Dirt Farmer. Lovely song, but with the ethanol subsidies and everything it is hard to imagine even the poorest old dirt farmer unable to make a living growing corn.

Anyway, I’m rested, relaxed and raring to go. ((I hope Luigi is too, but he’s possibly had a more stressful break than I have, if newspaper reports are anything to go by.)) There’s only one way to catch up with the backlog of stuff that’s come in over the past two weeks, and that is to ignore it. Inevitably, that means missing some good stuff, but if we were to look for it we’d never get started again. So help us out.

Is there some really interesting bit of agrobiodiversity news we’ve missed? Some new twist on agricultural biodiversity? Let us know. Thanks.

Takin’ a break

Bad Santa So we discussed this thing among ourselves, and decided that we would both have a more enjoyable rest if we put this blog to rest too. Temporarily. That way we won’t be fretting about connections and internets and all that technology. Just about over-eating, our solemn duty at this time of year.

In the meantime, you could visit our page of links and try visiting some of them from time to time. So, for a couple of weeks we’re off to our respective non-work homes. We wish you everything you might wish for yourselves, and we’ll see you early in January.

Second “Farmer First”

This totally passed me by. The Institute of Development Studies just hosted a workshop entitled ‘Farmer First Revisited‘ from 12-14 December 2007, “to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the original ‘Farmer First’ event.” That event (and the associated book) was quite a milestone, and the papers presented at this month’s reprise look worthy of their illustrious predecessors presented back in July 1987. The very Web 2.0 conference website includes a timeline and blog.

Getting ready for changing climates

Four papers together give an insight into what global warming promises for agriculture and agriculturalists, and how to deal with it.

ResearchBlogging.orgSome people will tell you that global warming is something we can cope with because it won’t actually create any new climates, just shift the old ones around a bit on the the surface of the Earth. They’re wrong. ((Williams, J. W., Jackson, S. T., & Kutzbach, J. E. (2007). Projected distributions of novel and disappearing climates by 2100 AD. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(14), 5738-5742.)) John Williams and his colleagues published an article in PNAS in the spring that shows conclusively that even the IPCC’s B1 scenario, in which modest reduction sees CO2 stabilized at 550 parts per million by 2100 AD, creates considerable risk of completely novel climates.

Continue reading “Getting ready for changing climates”

Tangled Bank #95

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? Was it only two weeks ago that the last biological carnival went up? How much longer can I keep this rhetorical ball of nonsense in the air? Tangled Bank 95 is up, hosted at Ouroboros. Go! Expose yourself to some diverse ideas. You’ve already read the three pieces we had the greedy gall to submit.