Back to Basics

Well, well!

The largest ever study done on the subject concludes that using the techniques of "agro-ecology" increases agicultural yields by nearly 80% on average.

"Agro-ecology" turns out to be a fangled name for good old-fashioned common-sense practices like (as reported by the Daily Telegraph) "planting trees and crops together, mixing livestock and arable farming and using natural predators to control pests and diseases".

As another Telegraph article has pointed out, as well as creating better yields over time than intensive farming, organic farming creates jobs in the developing world - a far better way to combat proverty than providing aid to buy complex chemicals, machinery and seeds, or to import food.

"Going organic," says this report, "almost always boosts the incomes of small Third World farmers, because they no longer have to buy expensive chemicals.

This is vital, as three quarters of the world's poorest people depend on small-scale agriculture to eke out a living. Those that have land often do not have enough, so have to buy food as well; half of the word's undernourished people are smallholders and their families.

The landless are even worse off, and have to seek work as labourers. Again, a switch to organic agriculture can help, for it employs many more people, creating more than 170,000 jobs in 2007 in Mexico alone."



 

Inheritance

I just spent the weekend at a friend's Victorian pile in the Scottish Borders.  It was a wonderful and relaxed couple of days of blazing midsummer sunshine - till well past 10 in the evening - conversation, snooker, walks, tours, food, drink. 

The pile sits in the middle of a moderately extensive estate which was once home to a hundred workers, now reduced to just a few. In its heyday, this estate would have been its own self-sustaining ecosystem.  With its livestock and arable farm, its kitchen gardens and greenhouses, lochs and streams, dairy and laundry, water mills and workshops, more or less everything that it needed would have been produced or processed onsite.  Perhaps as many as 500 people would have found employment or sustenance.

My friend has the responsibilty - to her family and indeed the nation - of keeping the great house and its lands and cottages in some kind of working order, and for the first time I realised just how awesome that responsibility is when the inheritance is such an important component of the history and fabric of its surroundings.

I also realised, though, that estates such as this are just a microcosm of our own global ecosystem, and we all bear the responsibility of passing on that inheritance in as good or better order than we received it.  Right now, I'm afraid, we are acting like the claasic wastrel son, gambling and mortgaging the assets away in a haze of gluttony and intoxication.  We all know the end of those stories.  The creditors come knocking ...

BBC Debate on GM Crops

"You and Yours" debates GM. 

Even if you have absolutely no interest in the issues, you can just drift around in the silky vapours of Winifred Robinson's wondrous voice.

Make your own: delicious ginger ale

Just finishing some nettle beer I made about a month ago - a really grown-up flavoured drink that's very healthy, very refreshing on a summer's day and wildly outdoes champagne in the fizz stakes.  They should really use it to spray all over each other in those Formula 1 podium ceremonies.

Next up in the summer drinks line-up will be elderflower cordial and champagne, but meantime, here's a great, utterly simple recipe for home-made ginger ale that takes no time at all and will wow your friends around the barbecue.

The equipment you'll need is:

• A 2-litre plastic cider bottle (it must have been something used for well-pressurised  drinks, not just an ordinary Coke bottle or similar.  You can use the same one several times over, but not indefinitely because the pressure - see below- will eventually weaken it.  But a great re-use!)
• A funnel 

 Ingredients:

• 200g sugar, either white caster or unrefined if you want the ginger ale to be a bit brown
• A piece of fresh ginger root about 2cm square when peeled (you want to end up with about 2 tablespoons of ginger when grated)
• Instant yeast, 1/4 teaspoon (the kind they sell in supermarkets for breadmaking is fine)
• Juice of a lemon

Method:

1. Funnel the sugar into the bottle
2. Add the yeast and shake to mix with the sugar
3. Grate the ginger finely - one of those microplane graters is perfect for this
4. Squeeze the lemon, add the grated ginger to it, and funnel both into the bottle
5. Fill the container that held the lemon and ginger with water and then rinse this through the funnel so that all the bits end up in the brew
6. Half fill the bottle with with some cool/tepid water (about 20% if you have a thermometer), screw on the top and shake it to start to dissolve the sugar
7. Now fill the bottle to about 3cm from the top, cap and shake again till the sugar is well dissolved.  Pay attention to the bottom of the bottle where the sugar can collect
8. Screw the bottle cap on firmly and, if you have one, put the bottle in your airing cupboard for an hour or two to get the fermentation going.  This fermentation will naturally carbonate the drink, but you do need to ensure the brew doesn't get too gassy, so ...
9. Check the bottle periodically. When you feel the sides getting hard, unscrew the cap carefully to allow a little bit of the pressure to escape, then screw it shut again and leave for another few hours till the sides of the bottle have hardened up again.  All this should take no more than 12 hours, so if you make the brew in the morning it will be done by the evening
10. Put it in the fridge, which will stop the fermentation and chill the ale nicely
11. Drink within a day or two, either sieved to remove the ginger bits, or unsieved, which makes it stronger

Truly delicious!

A Professor Hits the Nail on the Head

Economist Ken Rogoff makes the link, which I have been banging on about in these posts, between our current failures to control technology in the financial markets and the Gulf of Mexico, and the risk of doing so in areas such as genetic modification.

Right on, Professor!

History Man

A very interesting and insightful profile of my old friend Richard Rabinowitz in The Atlantic, which cites him (deservedly) as "the premier public historian in America".

I first met Richard and his wife Lynda late one evening in the library of our hotel in the Outer Hebrides, in the early 1990s.  Other guests had all long since gone to bed, and they were reading Daniel Deronda to each other.  How could you not instantly like people who did that?

By far the most learned person I have ever met, Richard can speak knowledgeably - but more importantly, intriguingly - on almost any subject worth discussing, from baseball to malt whisky to the history of the Brooklyn Bridge.  He was kind enough to be nice about a little exhibition I once (amateurly) curated when I was running the Harris Arts Festival, and whose appeal to him this profile now makes me better understand.  I last saw him at a particularly tribal meeting of the Yankees and the Red Sox at the new Yankee Stadium; an evening full of interesting revelations!

American History Workshop, which Lynda and Richard run, has in recent years mounted some truly groundbreaking shows at the New York Historical Society.  Stop by if you're there.

Bees or mobiles - your chance to vote

As BP continues its increasingly farcical mud-and-golf-ball experiments with mile-deep engineering in the Gulf of Mexico, it turns out that rising waters behind the massive - and massively controversial - Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze in China are causing all kinds of unforeseen seismic activity, requiring hundreds of thiusands more people to be removed from their homes and ancestral lands.  More evidence that our opinion of our cutting-edge engineering prowess - in particular where massive interventions in nature are concerned - far outstrips our actual capabilities.

Meantime scientists in India claim to have found evidence that electropollution (or "electrosmog" as they call it), may be behind the failure of honeybee colonies, due to interference with the bees' navigation systems.  People seem dubious, but I wonder what would happen they turned out to be right, and that the only way to save the world's bees (and most of our agricultural output) was to shut down all our mobile phone networks?  I've absolutely no doubt that the response would be to keep the networks open, in the utter confidence that we could engineer a solution (by genetic modification perhaps?) to keep the bees flying...