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The glories of the harvest

The Big Picture, a wonderful round-up of great photographs hosted by The Boston Globe, takes a look at the harvest.

Wheat being harvested.
Wheat grain is poured into a truck on a farm in Great Wilbraham, United Kingdom on July 18, 2012. (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg)

Harvest is a time of plenty, when the season’s hard work is rewarded by bounty. Many of the rhythms of our lives are shaped by the gathering of crops, even if most of us now live in cities. Worldwide, festivals and rituals mark the passage from growing season to harvest, with indigenous and popular practices making fall in the Northern Hemisphere a festive time. This year sees a reduced harvest in much of the world as extreme weather decimated many regions. Half of the United States is in prolonged drought, as well as much of Europe. In India, the monsoon is 20 percent off the annual average. Food prices are expected to rise by 2013 as demand taxes supplies, and later the price rises will transfer to the meat industry as costs of feed for livestock are passed on. Gathered here are images of farms industrial and traditional, crops critical and obscure, and harvest festivals among drought and bounty.

All the images are just stunning, and a reminder of both the similarities and the differences of cultures around the world.

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Featured: Microsoft

Cédric Jeanneret has a lot of questions on the IUCN-Microsoft partnership on Red Lists. Here’s a couple to be getting on with:

What and where are Microsoft’s GIS/spatial analysis know-how and capacity? No doubt its Computational Ecology and Environmental Science team could create an excellent geo-analysis tool in no time, but should we expect another, MS-proprietary geo-file standard? Probably not-so-proprietary, since Microsoft and ESRI are long-time partners, and certainly that partnership had something to do with the MS-IUCN collaboration. This then gives some sense to the new partnership. Most certainly a greater part of the SSC experts use ESRI software, so why not deal with ESRI directly and its arcgis.com platform? One reason could be that the ‘Red List’ is bigger than ESRI, so big so that only a corporation like MS could handle the data and queries.

Read them all.

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What’s wrong with this picture?

Slideshare is a great resource, but I’m always slightly worried I might be missing something. Take, for example, the presentation on the barriers to adoption by Haven D. Ley, just shared by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative. In particular, look at the seventh slide. It includes this diagram:

No reference to genebanks? Really? But, who knows, maybe the presenter mentioned the need for an occasional influx of novel diversity, and the best source for that, in their verbal comments on the slide. Or made the point that the diagram is necessarily a simplification. Or even that this is an illustration of how NOT to do breeding. I’d be interested to know what our breeder readers think of this diagram as a representation of their trade.

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IUCN and Microsoft map threats to biodiversity

“We’re building an application that allows people to map those threats spatially,” Joppa explains. “We’re trying to provide a repository of evidence for threats to species.”

Lucas Joppa is talking about a collaboration between Microsoft and IUCN to map threats to biodiversity. Worth keeping an eye on. But I wonder if they’ll consider agrobiodiversity too. If so, we have some ideas here at the blog. Anyway, presumably the thing will link up with GeoCAT in some clever way.

LATER: And also link to this? Or at least suck in the data?

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How vanilla is like Chanel No. 5

The Food Programme, on BBC Radio 4, has been running a little miniseries on spices: cloves, vanilla and mustard. I haven’t yet heard mustard, but cloves and vanilla were interesting, not least because I had no idea vanilla was thriving in Uganda, thanks to Ndali farm and Lulu Sturdy. The programme even prompted Luigi to wonder whether his MiL might be able to grow vanilla in Kenya.

What really caught my attention, though, was when someone called Niki Segnit enthused that:

Vanilla is the Chanel No. 5 of the flavour business.

First of all, I have absolutely no idea what that means. Secondly, I wondered whether she actually knew how right she was, in at least one respect. Ylang-standing readers of this blog will remember that Chanel No 5 “is a blend of entirely synthetic aldehydes, and has been since its launch in 1921“. And vanillin? That was one of the first important flavours to be synthesised, in 1876.

Somehow, I doubt that that is what was meant.