DFID and Gates team up for agricultural research

A good initiation, but there is a lot to comment!! What about bread of poor people around the tropics and subtropics ... Cassava!! Always neglected in the same way poor people are in this world, reserved only for rich in the North !! There are millions of poor people suffer of hunger, but nobody is found in this situation in countries where wheat planted and consumed. In the worst hypothesis wheat consumers loose few calories, and eat less fine bread that may be mixed with other cereals flour.

While wheat reached maximum to improve in productivity, cassava still produces less than a third of its capacity. If very few millions of the referred to amount had been available to those neglected and forgotten groups of research in Brazil , it would certainly boost production of this poor people crop. With few thousands of dollars it had been transformed to a nutritive, high protein and vitamin crop. Imagine if some of these provisions been available.

Work from Brazil is also showing solutions for Big as well as small scale agriculture

Our farming for over 10,000 years has been responsible for 2/3rds of our excess greenhouse gases. This soil carbon, converted to carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide began a slow stable warming that now accelerates with burning of fossil fuel. The unintended consequence has been the flowering of our civilization. Our science has now realized the consequences and developed a more encompassing wisdom.

Modern Agriculture has evolved in the ability to remove the limitations to plant growth, from burning forest for ash fertilizers, to bison bones, to Guano islands, then in 1913, to crafty Germans figuring out how to suck nitrogen from the air to now with natural gas derived fertilizers. These chemical fertilizers have over come nutrient limits to growth for 100 years.

NPK and the "Green Revolution" in genetics have brought us to where we are, all made possible by basically mining soil carbon stocks. So we have now hit a carbon limit in two distinct ways. The first is continued loss of soil carbon content, the second is fossil carbon energy cost. The present farming system spends ten cents of fossil energy delivering one cent of food energy.

We can not go back, but we can go forward with our newly acquired wisdom. Wise land management, conservation agriculture and afforestation can build back our soil carbon, Biochar allows the soil food web to build much more recalcitrant organic carbon, (living biomass & Glomalins) in addition to the carbon in the biochar.

We can rectify the carbon cycle, and beyond that, biochar systems serve the same healing function for the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, toxicity in soils and sediments and as a feed additive cut the carbon foot print of livestock by 50%.

http://biocharfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=55&Itemid=75

US Focused Biochar report
http://www.biochar-us.org/pdf%20files/biochar_report_lowres.pdf

I hope a part of this grant is used for growing more vegetables. From my visit to three African countries I noticed poor Africans eat very little vegetables. In order to remedy this situation, I use container and vertical gardens which can be set up for no cost at all and produce good vegetables. Interested persons may visit:http://www.cityfarmer.info/2011/01/12/job-s-ebenezer-and-technology-for-the-poor/

These techniques are simple and can be used in urban gardening. Landless poor can use discarded containers and set up vertical gardens to increase their vegetable production. Please send your comments to technologyforthepoor@yahoo.com

Job S. Ebenezer, Ph.D.
President
Technology for the Poor