Agritourism bloggish thing from a Canadian. Chock full of material. Agritourism ad-farm? from Bali (not sure what to make of this one.) Agritourism holiday from a company in Africa. Sounds like fun; write us a report if you go.
King Corn
Here’s an interview with the makers of the documentary King Corn, which is partly about how maize “covers the food landscape,” as well as the actual landscape, in the US.
More methane please, we’re Vermonters
The state of Vermont in the US would likely greet Luigi’s news about less flatulent fodder with horror, if there were any Acacia or Sesbania there. Vermont has one of the fastest-growing alternative energy programmes in the US, all based on the prodigious output of its vast dairy herd. Better yet, methane is a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So burning methane is win-win: less methane, and less carbon dioxide than non-renewable power-station fuels. via Grist.
Cutting down on cow emissions
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and ruminant farm animals belch out a huge amount of the stuff. No wonder people are scouring agrobiodiversity for animal feeds that minimise emissions. A paper in Animal Feed Science and Technology ((C.R. Soliva, A.B. Zeleke, C. Clement, H.D. Hess, V. Fievez and M. Kreuzer. In vitro screening of various tropical foliages, seeds, fruits and medicinal plants for low methane and high ammonia generating potentials in the rumen. Animal Feed Science and Technology. Corrected Proof, Available online 18 October 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anifeedsci.2007.09.009)) has come up trumps. The researchers found differences in methane production not just among tropical feed species, but also among accessions of Acacia angustissima and Sesbania sesban. Something to add to the list of evaluation descriptors.
On the ground in West Bengal
In West Bengal, a penniless activist is preserving 542 local varieties of rice on a teeny farm. It’s an amazing story, as Josh Kearns tells it. He visited Debal Deb’s research station and blogged about it here.
Folk traditions that were widely practiced until just a few generations ago, such as valuing seeds in non-monetary terms and freely sharing resources, have been sacrificed under market culture. Since Debal gives his seeds away for free, he runs the risk of their not being appropriately valued; whereas, if a farmer takes out a huge loan to buy Monsanto’s HYV seeds and they fail to produce a satisfactory yield (or fail altogether, which happens frequently), he blames himself for being a lousy farmer rather than Monsanto for ripping him off.
Just one of the problems of taking care of crop biodiversity outside the mainstream. Kearns does not say that Deb is no ordinary agroconservationist. He’s a friend of a friend, as it happens, and has a PhD from Calcutta University and several published papers and a book to his name.
Still, Kearns reports that against the odds, Debal Deb is succeeding. And while that is good news, I do wonder what the next stage is. OK, so he and his crew are conserving and describing the varieties (to forestall a rights-grab). But there must be ways both to support that work and to make use of the biodiversity to improve lives.