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Crawling the web for agrobiodiversity threats

We have often mused here — mainly idly, it must be said — about the possibility of an automated, internet-based system for monitoring the threat of genetic erosion. While we muse, it seems, others roll their sleeves up and, well, do stuff. Welcome to the Threat News Explorer, news of which has reached us via Resilience Science. We’re talking here about “multiple interacting threats (wildfire, insects, disease, invasive species, climate change, land use change)” to “wildlands,” rather than agricultural biodiversity, and so far it looks like mainly in the US. But still, it’s a start. And perhaps of interest to our friends working on the crop wild relatives of the US.

LATER: If you were doing agrobiodiversity threats, you might look at new disease records, for example…

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Featured: Kenyan hoes

Diana weighs in on the whole hoe thing:

This could be a misprint and-or misunderstanding on the part of the writer? Though, even at the ‘correct’ price, hoes can be a major investment for poorer smallholders. That is the case here in Burundi, where a hoe may be shared by several families and is often included as part of an agricultural ‘package’. In the 19th century in central-east Africa, economic transactions were frequently carried out with hoes.

Which kind of puts the whole thing in perspective.

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Getting genebanks right

There are 5,000 varieties of potatoes in the gene bank in Chile. Wotske, this year, is growing 17.

Wotske is Rosemary Wotske, owner of Poplar Bluff Farm near Strathmore in Canada, and more power to her. But what about this large potato genebank in Chile? That sounds interesting.

Too interesting, it turns out. Because of course there isn’t one, as anyone who has spent even five minutes looking into potato genebanks can ascertain. Or rather, there is a potato genebank in Chile but it’s got about 700 accessions and not 5,000 — or it did the last time the data in WIEWS were updated. And there is a much larger, international genebank not too far away, at the International Potato Center (CIP), but it’s got about 4,300 potato landraces, and Peru isn’t Chile is it?

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The price of hoes in Kenya

This post is not really about agricultural biodiversity, but I think it is worth stretching a point on some occasions. Take a look at the caption for this photograph. It’s the last in a gallery from The Guardian which goes with a nice write-up of what sounds like a very worthy Farm Africa project.

Forty-five pounds for a hoe? Forty-five pounds? I must say I’d missed that when I first went through the photos, but when Jeremy pointed it out I had to admit that seemed a bit steep for a hoe.

Well, is it just us? What do we know about the price of hoes in Kenya, right? Internal evidence in the article suggests that £45 is a lot of money, but a fair price for a hoe.

But low-tech can still be costly. Mwanza says she would like more hoes, but at £45 a hoe, it is far more than she can afford. The simple brick house she lives in with one of her children is no bigger than a small bedroom.

But googling comes up with a much cheaper price in Uganda:

“A hoe is a very cheap thing. It costs Shs 7,500 each and when I buy one it can last more than two years,” Nyakoojo said.

That would be about £1.70. And when the wife sent text messages to everyone she could think of in Kenya she got back figures closer to the Ugandan than The Guardian. A very fancy hoe goes for about KSh 1,200, or £8, we were told.

So what’s going on? Normally, I’d probably just dismiss it as a misplaced decimal point somewhere. Or perhaps a misunderstanding about what exactly the tool involved is. But it appears that this “hoe” is the weapon of choice in the Manichean fight against GMOs.

Small African farmers such as Mwanza stand on the frontline in the battle for higher productivity and agricultural development, a struggle being fought not with tractors and GM crops but with hoes, wheelbarrows and indigenous drought-resistant crops: cowpeas, pigeon peas, green grams, sorghum and millet.

So I think we should all be extra clear about what one costs. Starting with The Guardian. And the Gates Foundation.

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Do count your chickens …

… and feed them, and tuck them up at night

Kunming 18Regarding those kuroiler chickens, one of the things I’m pretty sure we discussed eruditely and at length was my firm recollection that a little bit of tender loving care would do more for chicken productivity than shiny new breeds, at least for poor village households. Turns out I wasn’t misremembering. A quick search turned up quite a few extra instances of research that makes that very point.

An FAO paper from 1997 points out:

In view of lessons from the past rural poultry improvement programmes, a new approach should aim at increasing flock productivity instead of individual animal productivity. The potential of the village chicken as a provider of food and income should be exploited. A combined approach is suggested, which must be accompanied by improved extension services and farmer training on good husbandry practices, namely: housing, hygiene, feeding and health control. Improvement techniques should be based on indigenous technologies and available local resources.

There’s more sound advice in a factsheet from FAO, which stresses the benefits to be gained by taking better care of young chicks and improving housing for the whole flock. Makes sense; if something else has eaten your birds, you’re not going to be able to.

An entire PhD thesis looks at Improvement of village chicken production in a mixed (chicken-ram) farming system in Burkina Faso. Of course I haven’t read it, but I did filch this from the abstract:

System analyses showed that both village chicken and sheep fattening could be used for improvement of livestock production and subsequent income generation at rural farm level. Furthermore, an integrated village chicken and ram-fattening farming system appeared to be a promising possibility for village chicken improvement. It allows to control village chicken scavenging and to reduce the high risks related to the free-range system. The studies demonstrated that regular supplementation with locally available feedstuffs as sorghum or local beer by-product can be used as feeding strategies to improve village chicken production.

The Poultry Hub links to a few other studies.

The point is that while new breeds are fine and dandy, especially for the intensive, commercial sector, villagers who keep chickens need information, knowledge and training, not shiny new breeds. And that requires extension services, and even if those don’t always work too effectively, we do know how to improve them.

Chickens represent one of the best options to improve the livelihoods of poor rural families, but bringing that promise home to roost requires plodding, unglamorous extension work, and that’s just not a priority any more.