Posts

Posted on

Welcome Bankers

A warm but somewhat belated welcome to everyone visiting from Tangled Bank 72, so ably hosted by Ouroboros, and the other blogs that have linked to us this week. We’d have put the mat out earlier, but my esteemed colleague Luigi, who wrote the article on new software approaches to taxonomy and identification, is traveling and temporarily out of reach. (I have no excuse, other than the demands of paying work.)

Anyway, aside from kicking around and seeing if there’s anything here that attracts your fancy, we’d also like to enlist your help. If you come across any trifles that relate to our obsession with agricultural biology, please toss them our way. We look, but we can’t find everything, or even a small part of everything. There’s a contact form, or you can simply comment on any item. One of us is generally keeping an eye on them.

Thanks.

Posted on

The diverse crops of Kenya

I’ll be away for about a week so blogging might be a bit light, but I couldn’t resist mentioning the following four stories that were in the print edition of the Daily Nation this morning before leaving:

  1. A new climbing bean variety developed by the University of Nairobi and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute has been released and will be ready for commercial production by June.
  2. Coconut vendors in Mombasa are set to have access to a new technology (developed by FAO in collaboration with the Intermediate Technology Development Institute) for keeping coconut juice fresh for up to 3 weeks.
  3. The vice-chairman of the Rift Valley branch of the Kenya Horticultural Society asked local universities to start breeding new flower varieties rather than using material from the Netherlands and Israel.
  4. A group of Nyeri farmers have started selling their coffee directly to international dealers rather than through the traditional central auction system.

I thought the range of these articles really gave an good impression of the great variety of Kenyan agriculture and agricultural research.

See you again soon…

Posted on

Japan’s genebank

Looks like the genebank of the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Japan has revamped its English web site. There’s a request form, too. So, use it! More people ought to avail themselves of the treasures in genebanks, and it isn’t hard to do. It makes use of the genebank, which adds to its perceived value, and it could bring you joy and delight in your fields or gardens.

Posted on

Award for The Land Institute

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.

Posted on

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.