Posts

Posted on

Traditional foods get the upscale treatment in Kenya

PIX1.jpg

Matoke, spinach (local, or genuine Spinacea oleracea?) and rice (why not sorghum, or millet?) about to be served at a Nairobi restaurant. 1 The photo illustrates an article in the Daily Nation, following up on Agriculture Minister William Ruto’s call for traditional crops to be given a greater role in Kenya’s food security plan. According to the article, Kenya’s farmers, or their representatives, seem to want more and better incentives to turn away from maize. I wonder, though, whether the most far-sighted farmers, and restaurants, won’t show the way by adopting agricultural biodiversity and thus turning a healthy profit, thank you very much.

Posted on

Mystery of the undead Fukuoka

Fukuoka1.jpg File this one under spooky. Yesterday, walking in the Italian countryside, I spotted an unusual sign. It says, in effect, Permaculture, Fukuoka Method. How many people passing that sign would have the faintest idea what it meant? My companion had no idea who had put it up, or why. I told him briefly about Fukuoka, and he said he’d ask around among his neighbours and see what he could discover. And I took a close look at the hedge in which the sign was planted, and I couldn’t really see anything too unusual about it. A couple of apples, possibly not wildlings, brambles, rose-hips.

Fukuoka2.jpg

The spooky part? Exactly one year ago today, we noted the death of Masanobu Fukuoka, who died a year before I snapped that sign.

Was it really a permaculture hedge? And is this something general in Italy, posting signs of this nature? Maybe someone could enlighten me.

Posted on

Getting to the bottom of potato late blight resistance

There’s a bit of an argy-bargy developing in the comments to Robert’s provocative post Inorganic farming. Anastasia raised the question of transgenics for fungal resistance, which Robert echoed. Patrick then waded in bullishly to ask why transgenics were needed, when breeder Tom Wagner “has created quite a number of potato lines totally resistant to late blight”. And that created a clamour from Robert to the effect that he couldn’t find any evidence of Wagner’s success on this front.

Two points.

First, although Patrick was perhaps too modest to say so, he has arranged for Tom Wagner to be at a meeting in Oxford, England, as part of a Greater European Tour that Tom is undertaking in the autumn. So anyone who wants to know about his selections for late blight resistance can get it straight from the horse’s mouth. And report it here, please.

Secondly, don’t panic. Scientists at the University of Dundee in Scotland and elsewhere have discovered a single gene that, they say, is the key to blight resistance. “We are really excited by the discovery of RXLR. This has provided a signature to search for proteins that are delivered inside host cells, where they may be exposed to plant defence surveillance systems,” said Professor Paul Birch, the team leader. Clearly it won’t be long before the threat of late blight is a thing of the past.

Posted on

Featured: Blight

Robert asks the tough questions:

If there is demand for a diverse set of resistant and tasty varieties, and “there’s a lot available” why don’t breeders and seed companies supply? No demand? Too expensive? All in cahoots with Big Chemicals?

I think we need some in-depth research to tell us how large the “demand for diversity” pimple is on the rump of “big breeding”.