The Backup Copy from Kunnskapsfilm on Vimeo.
You really wanted another video about Svalbard, didn’t you? Of course you did. Check out the whispering seeds at around 6 mins in. Looks like it’s not the whole thing, though. Pity.
Farmers have already fed the future
Edward Carr, in his pursuit of Doing Food Security Differently, has taken a leaf out of William Gibson‘s book to declare: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. Carr is talking specifically about climate change, and rather than anguishing over whether the future can be fed, he asserts that “Farmers in the Global South have already fed the future”.
[M]any [farmers] around the world, have already seen the future – that is, they have already lived through at least one, if not several, seasons like those we expect to become the norm some decades in the future. These farmers survived those seasons, and learned from them, adjusting their expectations and strategies to account for the possibility of recurrence.
Their methods aren’t perfect, but Carr suggests that by relying on local indicators and their knowledge and experience, farmers have weathered some pretty bad years, at the very least staving off catastrophe. And maybe they would best be helped not by an entirely new shiny whizz-bang future but by a better understanding of the indicators they use and how and when they may cease to be useful.
If farmers use the flowering of a particular tree as a signal to plant a crop, then at some point, as climate changes, the signal will come at an inappropriate time, or not at all.
[W]e should be building upon the capacities that already exist. For example, we can plan for the eventual failure of local indicators — we can study the indicators to understand under what conditions their behaviors will change, identify likely timeframes in which such changes are likely to occur, and create of new tools and sources of information that will be there for farmers when their current sources of information no longer work. We should be designing these tools and that information with the farmers, answering the questions they have (as opposed to the questions we want to ask). We should be building on local capacity, not succumbing to crisis narratives that suggest that these farmers have little capacity, either to manage their current environment or to change with the environment.
Our friend Jacob van Etten has been developing the idea of crowdsourcing crop improvement. That, and climate analogues, can preselect varieties for a future climate from a similar climate here and now. Is there also scope for crowdsourcing local indicators that will work in a different place in the future?
Brainfood: Farming systems, Connectivity, Neolithic China, Paleolithic China, Wheat genomes, Litter domestication, Arabian relatives, Pepper composition, GMOs vs agrobiodiversity
- Using biodiversity to link agricultural productivity with environmental quality: Results from three field experiments in Iowa. Diversify any way you can. Even in Iowa.
- Improving conservation planning for semi-natural grasslands: Integrating connectivity into agri-environment schemes. Connect any way you can. Even in Europe.
- Early millet use in northern China. Very early. Starch grains push broomcorn millet use in China back 1,000 years, and foxtail millet 2,000.
- Paleolithic human exploitation of plant foods during the last glacial maximum in North China. And ten thousand years before millets, there were wild grasses, roots, tubers and gourds.
- Draft genome of the wheat A-genome progenitor Triticum urartu. Can be used to find agronomically important genes. But settle down, it’s only one of the 3 wheat genomes, after all.
- Aegilops tauschii draft genome sequence reveals a gene repertoire for wheat adaptation. Not so fast, here comes the D genome too…
- Side-effects of plant domestication: ecosystem impacts of changes in litter quality. Domestication led to higher quality, more easily decomposed litter.
- Crop wild relatives from the Arabian Peninsula. 400 of them.
- Compositional Characterization of Native Peruvian Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp.). There’s much variation, but not that much.
- Feeding the world: genetically modified crops versus agricultural biodiversity. Guess which one is drinking the other’s milkshake. And a similar blast from the past.
Healthier maize available for development
The real subject of this picture is not the yellow ear front and centre, but the orange ones in the background. They represent a high-carotene variety that could add to the arsenal of foods targeted at vitamin A deficiency. This orange maize was bred by a backyard breeder who is looking to share the variety with people who could help to take it further. The variety is “particularly suited to 30-36 degrees of latitude,” so any researchers in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere who might be interested in continued development, leave a comment here. The breeder is being supported by Seed Matters, and they’ll be keeping an eye on this post to follow up directly.
The politics of the language of food
The always stimulating Thinking Allowed on BBC4 devoted last week’s episode to food. There were two interviews. The first was with linguist Guy Cook on his project looking at the specific words and language strategies that the food industry uses to describe its wares. There’s a paper about it too. A number of interesting observations in there, but here’s the one that stuck with me: Prof. Cook’s databases suggest that the word “frankenfoods” is now used much more often by GM enthusiasts to ridicule their opponents than by the green lobby to describe the alleged dangers of playing God.
Nowt so queer as folk, and nowt like language to prove it.