Send us your diversity

Rather than just complaining about how the rest of the natural world fails to give agricultural biodiversity due respect, I decided to bring them all here to see for themselves. My cracking wheeze: host Linnaeus’ Legacy, “A monthly carnival celebrating the diversity of life on this planet, and the methods we use to understand it.” Then, in the onrush of wonderful blog posts about diversity in general, I’ll just slip in a few select agrobiodiversity items to prove that we too have what it takes.

There are many ways to submit posts.

And they don’t have to be your own posts, they can be things that have struck you as interesting and worth sharing.

I plan to publish on Wednesday 10 December, so there’s still time.

Genetically uniform bloggers

The bloggers of agro.agro.biodiver.seThrowing caution, and the principles of risk management, to the wind, agro.agro.biodiver.se bloggers gathered in a single location last week, and there’s the photograph to prove it. We won’t bother to name names, or to draw attention to the huge lack of diversity assembled. We will note that we all ate something different although we all drank the same stuff. And had a jolly good time.

Onion tears

A Kiwi researcher laments that regulations make it pointless to work on GMO’s in New Zealand. He mentions a particular sad case in point: the obstacles to testing tearless onions. There is no reference to this in the trade-journal for this type of news, the Onion 1. What to say? Perhaps there is nothing wrong with making onions tearless, but I feel it would be a loss. Not having rational objections, I search for a metaphysical answer. Something like Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem about an opposite case:

Mal do Século

Como se não bastasse o mundo de tristezas
entre céu e terra,
principalmente em terra,
vem o agrónomo, descobre
o vírus da tristeza nas laranjeiras.

My translation:

Times of Sorrow

As if there wasn’t enough sadness
between heaven and earth
particularly on earth
comes the agronomist, discovers
the sadness virus in the orange trees