I see yesterday’s Wired article on agricultural landscapes from space and raise you our post from months back.
Promote better nutrition and self-sufficiency with a few clicks
The Cooperative Society in the UK recently launched a scheme called Join the Revolution. People submit projects and other people vote for them. Winners get money — GBP 5000 — towards their project.
A project I already knew about alerted me and asked me to vote, which I have done even though, to be perfectly honest, the proposal didn’t exactly set the heart aflutter. There’s another project in similar vein that is currently doing better, so I won’t link to that, but it isn’t hard to scan all the submissions and pick the revolution you would most like to foment. In fact, you’re allowed to vote for as many as you want, which seems a little odd. On the other hand, having clicked the few times needed to register on the site, it seems wasteful not to vote often.
There are some videos about projects which, I think, were funded in an earlier round. Here’s one I could relate to.
Are there any other Coop-funded revolutions we should promote? Other competitions?
Celebrating Irish agrobiodiversity, and other things
Happy St Patrick’s Day! Now, do I link to A millet is a millet is a millet. Not
It’s been all over the news 2 that a new hybrid millet from China is going to solve Africa’s food problems. Even our friends at CIAT think so. Nowhere does it say in the endlessly reproduced press release, however, what kind of millet we are talking about. Pearl? Broomcorn? Finger? Foxtail? Proso? 3 What? Intensely annoying. Anyway, cut a long story short, it turns out to be foxtail millet, Setaria italica. We know because the “father of hybrid millet,” Zhao Zhihai, President of the Zhangjiakou Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hebei visited ICRISAT recently, and the information people there wrote up the visit, and took a photo to immortalize it.
But, as far as I know, foxtail millet is not much grown in Africa, so this statement in the press release is dubious to say the least:
“Millet is staple food in many African countries. The success of the ZHM’s pilot plantation promises good prospects for its mass production in Africa,” said Zhang Zhongjun, assistant to the FAO representative to China.
Pearl millet and finger millet are indeed staple foods in many African countries, but not foxtail of that ilk. Which is not to say that it could not become a staple. After all, it tastes better than teff, which, however, one is bound to point out, is not often called a millet.
“We helped some local farmers to grow the hybrid millet and promised to buy their harvests. But they refused to sell after harvests as they said the new millet tastes much better than their traditional millet, called teff,” Liu told Xinhua.
And that, dear reader, is why we have Latin names.
5th European Seminar on AgroBiodiversity
Thanks to the excellent DAD-Net 4 comes news of the 5th European Seminar on AgroBiodiversity: “Preservation or Adaptation? – Conservation in the face of a changing environment.” It’s to be held 25 September 2011 in Dimitrovgrad, Serbia (that’s near the Bulgarian border), as part of the annual meeting of the SAVE Foundation and the European SAVE Network. Sounds like great fun, especially the “Regional Fair of Balkan AgroBiodiversity.” Anyone going?