Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The initiative, Sowing New Seeds, funded by the Big Lottery Local Food Fund, will directly enable many more gardeners in the East and West Midlands to grow non-traditional crops, while also documenting how to grow them based on the experiences of the region’s diverse communities.
Sound like a great idea from Garden Organic, and you can follow the progress of the work on a great new blog. Thanks to Nigel for the headsup.
We’re hosting the next edition of Berry go Round, a blog carnival dedicated to plants and botany. In case you didn’t know, a blog carnival gathers together in one place, on a regular basis, good blog posts on a particular topic. It’s a way of pointing people to stuff they may not know about and of sharing the love. And we’ve had loads of submissions for the next Berry go Round.
Alas, most of them are idiotic submissions from idiots who are paid by even bigger idiots to waste our time and spoil the internet for everyone.
We have so far received 16 tip-top recommendations, from 15 Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True to 10 Things That Won’t Burn in a House Fire. You can imagine how thrilled we will be to share those with you next week.
The weird part about this spam torrent is that it probably involves real people. There’s a submission form to nominate posts for the carnival and it requires some pretty elaborate cutting and pasting that I suspect needs not a robot but a person. Even if it didn’t, there’s a person looking at each submission with a delete button at his fingertips. 1 And the people who are polluting our world with this crap are, I bet, being paid by their evil overlords to do so.
Wise up, cretins. Your crap ain’t gonna make it to our pages. Ever.
If, on the other hand, you genuinely want to share an interesting post on plants or botany — your own or someone else’s — use the form, or send direct to berrygoround at gmail dot com, and after intense scrutiny by our living, breathing crap detector, there’s a good chance it will make it to our pages.
We blogged before about the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects. But that was some months ago and there’s a whole bunch more programmes on agriculture-related objects in the can now. Well worth a listen.
I must confess to having some sympathy with Helen Hughes’ scathing critique of development in the South Pacific, but she goes too far, surely. For example, with reference to one of the Millennium Goals, she says that
“The ending of hunger” amounts to a stock diet of sago and stringy sweet potato. Population pressure, plus the erosion of hunting, has led to a decline in nutrition.
However, even in such undeniably poor and troubled places as the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal people eat several root and tuber crops, bananas and a range of indigenous vegetables. There certainly are nutritional problems in the Pacific. Rising rates of diabetes and heart disease are testament to that. But the modernization and homogenization of diets are to blame, not “sago and stringy sweet potato.” If anything, it will be work on those very same sweet potatoes so disparaged by Hughes that will end hunger in many parts of the Pacific.
And to suggest that oil palm cultivation is some sort of panacea is disingenuous at best. Finally, I’m no expert on the cultures of Papua New Guinea, but this parting shot
…why is it that after a decade of implementation of the Millennium Goals, backed by billions of taxpayers’ dollars, women in PNG villages choose to breastfeed piglets because pigs are more valuable than children?
sounds like a straw man to me.
You may remember our post a few months back about the heroic Mrs Sanaa Abdul Wahab Al-Sheikh and her efforts to save the Iraqi genebank. Well it seems that those efforts have attracted the attention of documentary film-maker Emma Piper-Burket and her team. I’ll be following their work, and really look forward to seeing the results of the project.