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Way too much of a mediocre thing

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.

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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?

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Brainfood: Farming systems, Connectivity, Neolithic China, Paleolithic China, Wheat genomes, Litter domestication, Arabian relatives, Pepper composition, GMOs vs agrobiodiversity

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Healthier maize available for development

HealthMaize

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.