A case for Darwinism, the garden mind

Michael Pollan talks about his garden zen and the moment he became aware of corn's plan for world domination.



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Swords into ploughshares

"Snarewear" jewelry, successfully changing the lives and fortunes of poachers in Zambia ensuring the survival of species threatened with extinction.

You may not see them in midtown Manhattan boutiques yet, but the latest rage in certain rural villages in Zambia is a line of necklaces, bracelets and other jewelry made from a one-of-a-kind material: wire snares once used to illegally catch wildlife. Called “Snarewear,” the handmade jewelry is the latest in a line of products sold by a growing band of reformed poachers, all of whom have joined a highly successful sustainable farming co-op designed in Zambia’s rural Luangwa Valley.

The co-op, known as COMACO (Community Markets for Conservation), is a voluntary program designed by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, that allows poachers to turn in firearms and snares in exchange for training in organic farming methods, bee-keeping, gardening, carpentry, and now, jewelry making. So far, over 40,000 snares, along with 800 firearms have been turned in. Many products are sold in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, and outlying towns under the brand name “It’s Wild!” (http://www.itswild.org/). Last year the program grossed over $350,000 in sales and has attracted over 35,000 members since its inception in 2002. The Wildlife Conservation Society estimates that it has saved thousands of animals from poaching, including elephants, lions and leopards.

Snare wire jewelry is an idea that COMACO director Dale Lewis of the Wildlife Conservation Society proposed to a Zambian jewelry designer, Misozi Kadewele. Faced with many hundreds of yards of confiscated snares left to rust in storage, Lewis decided to see if they could be transformed into something more useful.

“Snarewear is wearable art with a mission,” said Lewis. “Necklaces, bracelets, earrings and decorative pieces not only make a fashion statement, but a statement for conservation as well.”

Misozi uses seeds from local plants and trees incorporated with snare wire that she has handpicked from large bags of the tangled material. She employees several other local people to complete her creative team. It takes one person one day to complete a necklace, the group can produce five if they collaborate.

Completed snare wire jewelry and pieces are for sale at the regional Mfuwe Airport in Zambia, where tourists from around the world pass through to see wildlife in South Luangwa National Park. However, plans are already underway to expand sales via the Internet, though, as Lewis likes to point out: “Supplies are hopefully limited as snares will become a thing of the past in Zambia.”

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Sustainable crop solutions for Uganda

A team of American and Ugandan researchers worked with local farmers to test low-cost soil management alternatives in eastern Uganda. While each alternative soil treatment increased crop output, findings suggest that the best treatment plan varies from farmer to farmer as it is dependent on other factors.


Scientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the National Agricultural Research Organization in Uganda have joined local, eastern Ugandan farmers to evaluate the effectiveness of low-cost alternatives for soil treatment. By implementing alternative soil fertility management and a reduction in crop tillage, scientists hope to help small-scale farmers increase their crop yields.

Maintaining or improving the productivity of the ancient, weathered soils of eastern Uganda is a major challenge for small-scale, resource-poor farmers. Many Ugandan farmers are forced to work with soils with negligible amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous. Often, the cost to treat soils outweighs crop profits. To prevent soil degradation throughout the region, better soil management is needed.

With the help of local Ugandan farmers, the following management alternatives were investigated:

• Short-term fallow using mucuna, a herbaceous annual legume
  
• Cowpea rotation with sorghum
  
• Manure application
  
• Nitrogen and phosphorus applied as fertilizer
  
• Reduced tillage

Several soil fertility management practices and reduced tillage were cost effective in increasing sorghum crop yield in the region where little inorganic fertilizer is used.

“On-farm profitability and food security for sorghum production systems can be improved by use of inorganic fertilizers, manure, mucuna fallow, sorghum-cowpea rotation, and reduced tillage,” said Charles Wortmann, a co-author of the study.

The most beneficial alternative practice to increasing crop output will vary according to each farmer’s situation. While manure application may be best for fields on farms that also house animals as the source of the manure, farmers who do not have the means to purchase fertilizer may profit more from the use of the cowpea-sorghum rotation or mucuna fallow.

“The [Ugandan] farmers now participate in extension activities to inform farmers in other communities about this menu of management alternatives,” said Wortmann. “This approach to research and extension takes advantage of the local knowledge of farmers, is cost-effective, and is easily replicable for addressing crop production problems of small scale farmers throughout Africa.”

Wortmann and other scientists are continuing on-going studies to address the long-term sustainability of the alternative, low input practices.

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Resources::

The American Society of Agronomy (ASA) http://www.agronomy.org, the Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) http://www.crops.org and the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) www.soils.org

Keywords:: CROP CROPS OUTPUT UGANDA ON-FARM TRIALS SORGHUM COWPEA MUCUNA MANURE FERTILIZER TILLAGE

Earth's dirty little secret

Past civilizations have fallen when they wore out their supply of soil, and in his new book "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations,"University of Washington scientist David R. Montgomery says the same thing appears to be happening again -- with potentially far more serious consequences.


Throughout history civilizations expanded as they sought new soil to feed their populations, then ultimately fell as they wore out or lost the dirt they depended upon. When that happened, people moved on to fertile new ground and formed new civilizations.

That process is being repeating today the geomorphologist argues and the results could be far more disastrous for humans because there are very few places left with fertile soil to feed large populations, and farming practices still trigger large losses of rich dirt.

"We're doing the same things today that past societies have done, and at the same rate," said David Montgomery, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences who studies the evolution and structure of the various aspects of the Earth's surface. In essence, he said, we are slowly removing our planet's life-giving skin.

"It only takes one good rainstorm when the soil is bare to lose a century's worth of dirt."

Montgomery examines how soil is slowly created over time, the vital role it has played in the rise and fall of civilizations from Mesopotamia to Rome and the way it has shaped where and how we live today.

In the past, as soil was depleted in a particular region – the American South during the height of tobacco plantations, for example, or the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s – people moved to new areas that could support their crops. But Montgomery argues that their primary farming method – plowing under any crop residue and leaving the surface exposed to wind and water erosion for long periods – was a major cause of the conditions that drove them from the land.

Flat lands and areas with thicker, richer soil tend to have less natural erosion, while steeper areas have greater erosion from both wind and water. Removing vegetative cover just worsens the problem, Montgomery said.

When the Earth's population was smaller people could move from one place to another and give soil a chance to regenerate. But now, with more than 6 billion people on the planet, that option no longer exists, Montgomery said.

"We're farming about as much land as we can on a sustainable basis, but the world's population is still growing," he said. "We have to learn to farm without losing the soil."

He advocates a wholesale change in farming practices, moving to no-till agriculture, which he says would reduce erosion closer to its natural rate. That method would eliminate plowing and instead crop stubble would remain in the field, to be mixed with the very top layer of the soil using a method called disking. Farmers might need more herbicides to control weeds, but it would take fewer passes of farm machinery – and thus less fuel – to tend crops.

Currently about 5 percent of the world's farmers engage in no-till agriculture, the vast majority of them in the United States and Latin America, Montgomery said.

"We don't have to farm the way we do. It's as much a matter of culture and habit as it is of economics, and our habitual ways of farming have gotten people into a lot of trouble through the years," Montgomery said.

"It's more of a conceptual shift than anything else, but it's a conceptual shift that conserves the soil."

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Maize may have driven earliest destruction of rain forest

A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought.

Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C.

This young Mexican girl could be a direct descendant of the earliest Mesoamerican agricultural people, the Olmec

The results of Pohl's study, which she conducted along with Dolores R. Piperno of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama, Kevin O. Pope of Geo Arc Research and John G. Jones of Washington State University, will be published in the April 9-13 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The shift from foraging to the cultivation of food was a significant change in lifestyle for these ancient people and laid the foundation for the later development of complex society and the rise of the Olmec civilization, Pohl said. The Olmecs predated the better known Mayans by about 1,000 years.

"Our study shows that these early maize cultivators located themselves on barrier islands between the sea and coastal lagoons, where they could continue to fish as well as grow crops," she said.

During her field work in Tabasco seven years ago, Pohl found traces of pollen from primitive maize and evidence of forest clearing dating to about 5,100 B.C. Pohl's current study analyzed phytoliths, the silica structure of the plant, which puts the date of the introduction of maize in southeastern Mexico 200 years earlier than her pollen data indicated. It also shows that maize was present at least a couple hundred years before the major onset of forest clearing. Traces of charcoal found in the soil in 2000 indicated the ancient farmers used fire to clear the fields on beach ridges to grow the crops.

"This significant environmental impact of maize cultivation was surprisingly early," she said. "Scientists are still considering the impact of tropical agriculture and forest clearing, now in connection with global warming."

The discovery of cultivated maize in Tabasco, a tropical lowland area of Mexico, challenges previously held ideas that Mesoamerican farming originated in the semi-arid highlands of Mexico and shows an early exchange of food plants.

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Keywords:: ANTHROPOLOGY MARY POHL CORN MAIZE MEXICO FARMING TABASCO OLMEC FORESTS AGRICULTURE