Wes Jackson, the pioneer of perennial prairie polyculture, is to receive the 6th Environmental Award from Prescott College in Arizona for the work of The Land Institute, according to a press release. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Jackson and his vision of what agriculture could be, really learning from nature to craft a more sustainable farming system. It’ll be a while before we are “growing granola” in his immortal phrase, but The Land Institute’s experiments on mixtures of four or more species, drawn from different families to make optimal use of resources, are proceeding apace. The Prescott College award is by no means the first Jackson has received, but every bit helps to draw the attention of mainstream research to his ideas. Which is why I’m blogging it, I suppose.
What does Africa need (or want?)
On the one hand, you’ve got your Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pumping money into two international agricultural research centres to improve the yield of drought-stressed maize. On the other, you’ve got your ungrateful African civil society organisations declaring that these efforts and others like them “under-represent the real achievements in productivity through traditional methods, and will fail to address the real causes of hunger in Africa”. The truth, obviously, lies somewhere in-between. Is it too sappy to expect the Gates money to flow at least partly into researching traditional methods and agricultural biodiversity? Is it too sappy to expect the civil society organisations to curb their knee-jerk reaction against all modern science and economics?
Still, at least the Gates Foundations isn’t DuPont, telling the World Economic forum of the importance of private-public partnerships (code, I think, for government-subsidized research) to promote hybrid seeds.
Boosting the Indian rice crop
A report in The Hindu says that scientists in the Indian state of Kerala want to increase the production of rice. Nothing special there. But the report does single out the need for “efforts on a fast track to survey, identify, catalogue and conserve all traditional plant varieties of rice as part of the measures to increase productivity”. Of course it does not say exactly how that knowledge will be used to breed better rice. But another paper at the Kerala Science Congress “Biodiversity of rice in Kerala” said that many of the traditional rice varieties offered a pool of resistant genes against insect pests. And a team of Kerala Agriculture University scientists, in its paper on the “Scope of crop diversification,” called for rice-based integrated farming system.
You can’t do that in Europe
Scripps Howard News Service hosts a time-hallowed “I’m reading my seed catalogs” article, so prevalent during the winter months. As if to mock the European seed trade rules, the author focuses on all the weird and wonderful things she is able to try, thanks to small companies that specialize in biodiversity. While I, personally, would not buy seeds from at least one of the companies she names, I would at least like the pleasure of being able to boycott them, rather than have some faceless bureaucrats tell me what I may and may not grow.
One more cup of coffee
Who grows the best tasting coffee in Latin America?