The stuff that comes out of olive mills after the oil has been extracted is difficult to deal with. It ought to be a good addition to soils, increasing organic matter and other good qualities. But because it is a rather slimy sludge, it doesn’t decompose well. It is often composed by mixing half and half with sheep litter, and in a recent experiment, grape stems were added too. The result was faster, better compost. Olio, pecorino e grappa. Good for you, good for the land.
Featured: Traditional buildings
B backs up the World Bank on traditional buildings.
In our region frequented by the storms (Philippines), there are many accounts of ONLY traditional bahay kubo (a hut made of the bamboo and palm fronds) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipa_hut surviving the most violent of storms.
And in other news, a correspondent confirms Luigi’s recollection that there is a coconut specifically for rope-making.
Niu Kafa … in Samoa. Kafa means rope.
Law of unintended consequences, coconut edition
The late, great Garrett Hardin wanted society to move beyond literacy and numeracy to ecolacy, an ability to think ecologically. And he exemplified this with various stories that hinged on the consequences of small changes. Hardin’s key question: “And then what?” I think he’d have liked this one, which I heard on National Public Radio.
The government of Kiribati, a small island state in the Pacific, was concerned about overfishing. So it decided to subsidize the coconut oil industry, because if people earned more from coconut, they would fish less. Unfortunately, as the bumper sticker would have it, A bad day fishing is better than a good day working. In Kiribati, as elsewhere. After the coconut subsidies were introduced fishing increased by a third and the reef fish population dropped by almost a fifth.
Sheila Walsh, a graduate student at the Scrippps Institute of Oceanography, went out to Kiribati and discovered that “people earned more money making coconut oil, which meant they could work less to support themselves. And they spent their new leisure time fishing”.
Turns out that this is something that happens often in programmes to help fish stocks by persuading fisherfolk to do other things. People who fish like to fish, and that’s what they do. They like to be out on the water, according to lots of studies. Recognizing that, one potential solution incorporates ecolacy:
Walsh says she’s trying to help the government figure out how to fix the problem of overfishing, which they’d accidentally made worse. Maybe, she says, the government can create new jobs out on the water by hiring the fishermen to patrol newly created nature preserves.
Without their tackle on board, presumably.
Bent Skovmand remembered
A Facebook post by Dag Endresen of NordGen alerted me to the recent publication of the biography of Bent Skovmand, entitled The Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest. Bent Skovmand (1945-2007), a student of Norman Borlaug, was a very influential figure in the world of conservation and use of crop genetic resources in general, and of wheat in particular. The director of the Nordic Gene Bank (now NordGen) when he died, the books he kept in his office are touchingly maintained at NordGen’s Alnarp headquarters as a separate collection. I’ll be trying to get hold of the book.
The cattle of the Yakuts have their day in the sun at last
Juha Kantanen, a research scientist at MTT Agrifood Research Finland, had an announcement out on the DAD-Net discussion forum a couple of days ago which reproduced an MTT press release on what sounds like a fascinating book, Sakha Ynaga — Cattle of the Yakuts.
Siberia’s last remaining indigenous breed of domestic cattle, the Sakha Ynaga, or Yakutian cattle, inhabit the lands surrounding the Lena River in Russia’s remote Sakha Republic (Yakutia). During the soviet era, the Yakutian cattle were driven to virtual extinction, but thanks to dogged preservation efforts this remarkable, hardy breed has endured to the present day.
A multidisciplinary team of researchers from MTT Agrifood Research Finland and the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute explored the genetic uniqueness of the Yakutian cattle and the effect of social and cultural factors on the survival of the breed through periods of major upheaval in Russia’s history. The findings of this insightful study have now been published in the book Sakha Ynaga — Cattle of the Yakuts. The book champions the call for preservation of biodiversity, at a time when countless indigenous breeds around the world are facing the brink of extinction.
The book can be ordered from Bookstore Tiedekirja.