Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
“Wild bananas share with bats a long history that started some 50 million years ago.” Jeremy waxes lyrical about extension. Ah, those age-old Russian pastimes, hunting walrus and farming deer horn. Kellogg’s reaches out to PhilRice genebank. Indian sacred groves need help.
I have a thing about extension. I believe it is the great missing link in most thinking — and doing, for that matter — about conservation and use of agrobiodiversity. Genebanks around the world usually have reasonably well-established links with national agricultural research systems, but hardly any contact with extension workers, except maybe when it …
Long-term evidence for ecological intensification as a pathway to sustainable agriculture. Meta-analysis of 30 long-term experiments from Europe and Africa comprising 25,565 data points shows that increasing crop diversity and adding fertility crops and organic matter are as good for the yield of staple crops as N fertilization, but don’t add much if you already …
We’ve blogged about it before, but the 2021 Access to Seeds Index is now fully out, following the 2019 and 2016 indexes. ((Full disclosure: I’m on the Expert Review Committee.)) On September 21, alongside the UN Food systems summit, we launched the first regional results of 32 companies in Western and Central Africa. Then, on …
Continue reading “Full access to the full Access to Seeds Index”
You’ll remember that the good people at Access to Seeds Index rate seed companies on how and to what extent they make their products available to smallholder farmer in developing countries. Today they launched the results for 32 companies working in Western and Central Africa. Here are the key findings (I’m quoting): Seed companies are …
Continue reading “Smallholder access to seeds in Africa benchmarked”