Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Jeanne Osnas is not content to rest on her leaf-eating laurels:
I would love to know more about the plant species composition of regional diets around the globe. It would be amazing to put this information into a “master greens tree,” so we can evaluate the relative contributions to the greens tree of cultural history of plant use and the organismal and evolutionary biology of the plants themselves.
There has to be a way to make this a crowd-sourced effort …
Sometimes disparate things demand to be linked together, no matter how tenuously. So this morning, I see first that the G8 countries are following up on their 2012 promise to build a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition by holding a conference at the end of April on Open Data for Agriculture. The intention is to build a “global platform to make reliable agricultural and related information available to African farmers, researchers and policymakers, taking into account existing agricultural data systems”. And fine though that is, I can’t help feeling that helping African and other farmers to gather and share their own data might actually make a bigger contribution to food and nutrition security.
Then, it turns out that Howard Buffett’s foundation is supporting two ventures that promote food security in Africa (and elsewhere) a little more directly. First, there’s a spread in excess of 550 ha in Cochise County Arizona, where researchers can try ideas in an environment rather like the one that many African farmers endure.
The Cochise property focuses on farming as it’s done in Africa, where animals pull plows and most seeding is by hand. Two oxen will test equipment that will be used in different parts of the world. Researchers also use the oxen as they try to develop a new system to plant seeds at the same time the animals plow the land.
And Arizona isn’t the only place where Buffett is keen on draft animals. He also supports Tillers International, which teaches farmers around the world to use draft animals.
“What we’re doing now is conservation farming, an effort to provide more tools to deal with climate change,” [Dick] Roosenberg [Executive Director of Tillers International] said. “To me, the most exciting thing is the people we pick up from farms who are bright but not formerly educated and we put tools in their hands that allow them to do amazing things.”
“We see what someone is doing in South Africa and move it to Uganda, or Madagascar to Haiti,” he said. “We’re bouncing around the world as a catalyst.”
Conclusion: Sure it is good to have big governmental conferences to promote open data for agriculture. But would it hurt to do more in the way of actually working with farmers to improve their techniques and share successful approaches?
Another tour de force from The Botanist in the Kitchen: why we eat the leaves that we do.
There’s a bunch of good stuff in this post with which to regale fellow diners, should you be that sort of dining companion, and lots with which to take issue too, if you’re feeling argumentative. Despite all the caveats, most of which she anticipates, Jeanne manages a rather startling bottom line:
At the family level, we see that the greens tree has 15 families, but that most of the greens regularly consumed in the Western world are from only five of the 415+ families of seed plants currently recognized: Amaranthaceae (goosefoot family), Apiaceae (the carrot family), Asteraceae (the sunflower family), Lamiaceae (the mints) and Brassicaceae (the mustard family).
How different is it for foodways not contaminated by Meditearranean ancestry?
This post may just be too meta for most busy readers, but I just had to get the sequence right in my head, so apologies, and feel free to go and make a cup of coffee or watch the Svalbard video again instead of reading any further.
It all started with a Science paper entitled “Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance.” It popped up in our RSS readers here in late February, if memory serves, and we duly included it in a Brainfood in early March, together with a link to an NPR story dated 1 March and a facetious comment to the effect that it is difficult to add anything to the title. NPR did try its best, though, linking to another paper on pollinators published in Science at the same time, for example.
And there it rested, and arguably should have stayed. But then, on 27 March, SciDevNet did a story on that first Science paper, pretty much out of the blue, even highlighting the fact that it was a month old. In my opinion, it really didn’t add much to the NPR story, though it did link to another, earlier and much narrower, study by the paper’s lead author, the wonderfully named Lucas Garibaldi.
Which brings us to Mongabay. Normally totally on the ball, they waited until 3 April to publish their take on Garibaldi’s original Science paper. And really, to be honest, again they added very little to what NPR had said. Or indeed to the paper’s title, for that matter.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Garibaldi et al.’s paper is interesting and deserved a write-up. But three largely overlapping write-ups over the course of a month after publication? Well, you tell me. I know what I think.
