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Agricultural scientists have long concluded that the seed of some crops degenerates steadily with each planting. This is especially true for crops that are planted vegetatively, for example through cuttings or tubers, like the potato. Degeneration is the buildup of pests and diseases, passed one from one generation to the next in vegetative seed, slowly lowering the crop’s yield.

A long-term study by Ecuadorian plant scientist, Israel…

Goats were household members in Europe from ancient times until recently. And goats are still important on family farms in tropical countries, because goats will eat almost anything you give them, including plants that are too dry and tough for pigs, cattle and even sheep. Goats turn waste into milk. Goats are easily managed by women, who can sell the milk or give it to their children.

But goats can be fussy. In a recent video, Kenyan…

Whenever somebody has a monopoly over a certain food crop, or tries to create one, sooner or later other people will pop up to compete.

The red onion variety, Violet de Galmi, originally comes from the village of Galmi, a small community in Niger, about 500 kilometres east of Niamey close to the Nigerian border, where it has been grown for over 100 years. Its pungent flavour and thick bulbs, combined with the vast, informal Hausa…

Farmers need to take decisions every day. Smallholders living in remote areas often have no one to turn to ask advice. Nobody tells them which crop to grow or when is a good time to plant. The Yapuchiris are experienced organic farmers on the Bolivian altiplano who started recording their observations on weather, natural indicators and their crops on a daily basis. Some have done so for over 10 years.

In this harsh environment…

Food waste could be made into useful compost, instead of mixing it with plastic and other inorganic trash, as my wife Ana recently explained on a panel discussion on Radio Cepra in Cochabamba. She was invited by a local NGO, Alerta Verde (Green Alert), along with two agronomists who encourage schools and families to make compost, and a student who is writing his thesis on urban families who compost.

The first two panelists responded to the concerns of city dwellers: how to make compost while avoiding flies, rodents and bad smells. Old ideas from gardening manuals were recycled,…

In the twentieth century, gardeners innocently spread the water hyacinth to Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Water hyacinth has striking blue flowers and was used to adorn ornamental fountains. But it escaped and was soon clogging lakes, ponds and municipal water supplies.

Water hyacinth is such a survivor that you can drain ponds, let the plants dry out and burn them – then watch them grow again when the pond is refilled. It’s not surprising that control options are limited, particularly in open water, such as lakes and rivers.

The plants can be hand removed, by people willing…

In Peru, one way to save endangered, native potatoes is by selling and eating them. I recently learned that some restaurant owners are buying native potatoes directly from farmers.

Paul and Marcella and I went with local agronomist Raúl Ccanto to meet Guido Villegas, the Huancayo city official in charge of promoting food security and local commerce. He told us that the government of Peru has a program to feed children (Qali Wamru: “vigorous child”) where the national government sends foodstuffs that can be easily stored and transported.

The city of Huancayo supplements…

Degraded soil can be repaired, and replenished with nutrients, until it produces abundant harvests at lower costs, while removing carbon from the atmosphere, and putting it back into the ground. This is the optimistic message of David Montgomery’s book, Growing a Revolution.

In many parts of the world, soils have been degraded by frequent plowing. The benefits of releasing a burst of nutrients for the crops and killing weeds are overcome by exposure of the soil to erosion by wind and water.

In the Midwestern USA perhaps half of the original prairie soil, and most of…

In the 1500s, when men on sailing ships were casually spreading crop plants from one continent to the next, maize came to Africa. Fortunately, many of the maize pests stayed behind, in the Americas. But slowly, trade and travel are re-uniting maize with its pests. A caterpillar called the fall armyworm is the latest American pest to reach Africa, and it has spread across the continent, threatening one of Africa’s staple food crops.

Just as maize originally came to Africa without its American pests, the fall armyworm arrived without its natural enemies, including a couple of dozen…

Soils that have many living organisms hold more carbon and nutrients and can better absorb and retain rainwater, all of which are crucial in these times of a disturbed climate.

But measuring life in soils can be a time-consuming activity depending on what one wants to measure. While bacteria and fungi cannot be seen by the naked eye, ants, grubs and earthworms can.

In one of the training videos that we filmed in Bolivia, Eliseo Mamani from the PROINPA Foundation, a science and technology organisation, shows us meticulously how you can measure the visible soil organisms with…