Rhizowen summarizes what China’s farmers are doing to their soil:
Farmers of Forty Centuries blow it in a few decades. They’ll be needing a lot more land – somewhere else and soon. Any spare continents going?
Witnesses to agricultural adaptation
I think we may have already blogged about WWF’s Climate Witness programme, and if not we should have. It’s a very “effective way to illustrate the impacts of climate change on real people in many different locations around the world, and the action they are taking to address the issues.” Several of the stories involve agriculture, of course. For example, Joseph Kones from Bomet in Kenya says that drought has been increasing in his area over the past 20 years, and that his farm is part of a pilot adaptation project involving tree planting and the building of terraces. It would be nice to extract all the agrobiodiversity-relevant examples of changes and adaptation to them. Perhaps a job for the Platform on Agrobiodiversity Research? Which incidentally we have just added to our blogroll. See what I did there?
Competition for Svalbard?
A world class seed vault has been established on the Siachen Glacier to preserve India’s biological wealth for future generations, Dr. Ajay Parida, Executive Director, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation confirmed on Saturday.
The vault, which has a natural temperature between -20 and -40 celsius, will hold samples of rice, pulses, peas and beans and can be used for building food programmes across the nation.
This was at a meeting in which the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food Lars Peder Brekk also participated. I wonder if Mr Brekk mentioned the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Locating agricultural origins in Mexico and Italy
I know that domestication is not an event, but a process. I know that most crops and livestock were probably domesticated more than once, in more than one area. I know all this, but I’m still a sucker for papers that come up with specific times and places for the origin of agriculture. Papers such as Daniel Zizumbo-Villarreal and Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín‘s in the latest GRACE:
Sympatric distribution of the putative wild ancestral populations of maize, beans and squash indicate the extreme northwest Balsas-Jalisco region as a possible locus of domestication.
The paper is a review. It synthesizes a host of paleoecological, archaeobotanical and molecular data. Meanwhile, another paper, this time in the Journal of Archaeological Science, applies matrix mathematics to a somewhat different, though related, problem: the arrival of wheat in Italy. The authors looked at a selection of old emmer landraces from all around Italy stored in the German and ICARDA genebanks. 1 They developed a matrix of genetic distances among these based on microsatellite data. They then calculated matrices of geographical distances among the landraces based on different putative places of arrival of the crop around the coast of Italy. The two matrices showed the closest correlations for arrival sites located in northern Puglia, the heel of Italy. That corresponds with where the earliest Neolithic sites are found.
Now, I wonder, when will someone apply this method to maize, beans and squash molecular data and test mathematically Zizumbo-Villarreal and Colunga-GarcíaMarín more “qualitative” inferences?
Fertilizers: downside seen in China
It really does seem tragic that people need to make their own mistakes, rather than learn from others’. Latest case in point: soils in China are being destroyed by excessive use of fertilizers, which is making the soils too acid to support plant growth. Yields have already dropped 30-50% in some places. The conclusion that profligate and ignorant use of fertilizers comes from a paper published in Science by F.S. Zhang at China Agricultural University in Beijing and colleagues. That is behind a paywall, but there is a report in Nature News.
“They see the green leaves but they don’t see the impact on the soil. If they have a poor crop they think more fertilizer is needed, making matters worse,” Zhang says. Farmers routinely apply double and sometimes triple the necessary amount, he says. Better education could provide a simple solution to the fertilization problem.
People who promote “more fertilizers” as a panacea should consider that they need to deliver more than merely fertilizers.