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A little clean-up

Sunday morning; what could be nicer than to do a little weeding, planting and general tidying up? Nothing, if you have a row to hoe. Alas, if you don’t, there’s always blog maintenance.

I’ve updated various things so they ought to run more smoothly, fixed a page for The Competition, and done various other things that ought to be invisible.

One thing that is visible is a new category we call Nibbles.  It’ll appear over on the right, and is designed for linking to things that don’t really require much comment, but that we think may be of interest. We’ll see how it works out. If you have any comments, add them to this post. Thanks.

Oh, one more thing. The RSS feeds do not seem to be working all that well. Not sure why. The various different feeds (Posts, Comments, Nibbles) all seem to point to exactly the same place, which can’t be right. I’m working on it.

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Training materials for sustainable agriculture

The Centre for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz has some “instructional resources” on sustainable agriculture online. That’s mainly a course outline and references. There is stuff on agricultural biodiversity in the course outline, but somehow you don’t get the idea – or at least I didn’t – that this is something that is central to sustainability. More of an added benefit, or a fortuitous side-effect. See if you get the same impression.

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Another silver bullet?

The discovery of an enzyme which sits at a crucial step on the metabolic journey from glucose to that important anti-oxidant, vitamin C, opens the way for the kind of silver bullet thinking we have previously been somewhat critical of on this blog. Or it may not. We’ll see.

One of the researchers says:

We now have two strategies to provide enhanced protection against oxidative damage: Stimulate the endogenous activity of the identified enzyme or engineer transgenic plants which overexpress the gene that encodes the enzyme.

But I wonder whether this discovery will also allow the rapid evaluation of cultivars for vitamin C content?

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Sweetleaf hits India

I’m always somewhat ambivalent about the kind of story I saw today on Kangla Online about how some farmers in Senaputi district in north-eastern India are taking up the cultivation of Stevia. This is a South American herb in the Asteraceae which is widely cultivated around the world as the source of an alternative to artificial sweeteners.

On the one hand, it is always good to see farmers diversifying and experimenting, including with exotic crops. On the other, you wonder whether there isn’t a local – and locally used – species that might have been promoted and commercialized in this way. And will the money farmers raise from Stevia be sufficient to buy them and their families the nutritious food they will no longer be growing on their land?