Mother Earth News has an online seed finder. It lets you search the “online catalogs of more than 500 mail order seed companies,” mainly in the US, presumably. Test it out and let them know if you could or couldn’t find what you were looking for. We might need to send them our seed list…
Catch a fire, China-style
The need for diverse street trees
City planners take note:
Tree diversity helps prevent pests from gaining a foothold, said Mike Bohne, forest health group leader for the United States Forest Service. It also makes it so that a community does not lose its entire urban canopy if there is an infestation.
Too late for Worcester, Massachusetts (USA), where 80% of the street trees are maples. Most of them are infested by the Asian long-horned beetle and need to be removed. Property values may plummet further.
The beetle was introduced to the USA with wood packing material from China. Eradication efforts are intense as much larger economic damage is looming. Worcester is in New England and the invasive beetle might now spread to the famed maple forests that produce large quantities of syrup, wood, and leaf-peeping tourists.
SRI: does it work or what?
The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) strikes again, now on Java and Bali:
Farmers across Indonesia have bumper rice harvests thanks to a revolutionary method: 50 percent increase in yield with just one 10th of the seed, virtually no chemical fertilizers and little water.
SRI is a system which consists of transplanting widely spaced very young individual rice plants, using organic fertilizers, and not permanently saturating the fields with water. The method was developed — on the basis of existing farmer practices — by a priest in Madagascar in the 1980s, and it has since found a prophet in Norman Uphoff. It is still used in Madagascar, but mainly by larger farmers, as it is too labor intensive for the smaller farmers (who do the work for the large farmers). Or so I was told when I visited there earlier this year.
The BBC reported a doubling of yields in Nepal. George Bush was briefed about it during his visit to India. Luigi wrote about it a year ago. And now the reports of bumper crops in Indonesia.
All is for the best then? Not really: the whole thing is rather controversial. Tom Sinclair said this about it in 2004:
SRI appears to be only the latest in a family of unconfirmed field observations (UFOs) (…). While there is an abundance of “sightings,” they are anecdotal and reported by people who have minimum understanding of the basic scientific principles being challenged by such reports. In many cases, mysterious circumstances are invoked to explain the miraculous.
In a rather thorough review, in 2006, McDonald, Hobbs and Riha found that it sometimes works (in Madagascar), but that generally yields are 11% lower with SRI, not higher.
What is one to think then? Do newspapers blindly follow NGOs, and do farmers say what is scripted? Another case of overselling? Or is this a true farmer/priest led breakthrough, which scientist at fancy universities and research institutes just do not get?
There certainly has been overselling, with claims of unrealistically high rice yields (e.g., 15 tons per hectare). However, there could be circumstances where SRI does have benefits, for example on some problem soils (with iron toxicity), and perhaps in other low potential situations as well.
When SRI ‘works’, it is hard to know what farmers really did. Perhaps planting density was not quite that low, and organic fertilizer were applied at very high. What is SRI being compared with anyway? A degenerate farm, or a fully optimized ‘modern’ farm?
More field trials are planned. I am not optimisitic, but let’s hope that they will provide some clarity about the conditions under which SRI increases yields (or not). The dispute would be settled, and we’d have more rice for less resources.
Technology is not enough, part 2
Policy makers should give as much emphasis to incentives and affordability of modern inputs as to their efforts to ensure availability of technologies. Non-technical issues are just as important. The wider innovation system, encompassing technology delivery, marketing, and wider institutional and policy issues — most notably land — must be looked at more comprehensively, if productivity boosts in grain staples is to create the wider growth effects in the economy, with advantages for poorer and richer farmers alike.
This time from Ethiopia.