Polycultures in Modern Ag?

The September issue of CSA news has a nice (open access) article entitled: "Do polycultures have a role in modern agriculture?"

Some key caveats:

• While diverse plant mixtures have been associated with many benefits, high biomass yield (i.e. what farmers get paid for) is usually not one of them.
• It's very difficult to maintain complex plant mixtures - usually a single species will come to dominate.
• Our crop monocultures represent those crops that are best adapted to a given region.
• Establishing, maintaing and harvesting polycultures will require significant effort, risk, investments and training for farmers.

They conclude that polycultures are intriguing but definitely require more (agronomically realistic) research. 

Thoughts?

Evolution of Fruit Shape in Tomato

Someday you'll be able to use CAD software to draw up what you want a plant to look like and the software (containing detailed growth models) will tell you what genetic constructs you need to bring it into the world...

But for now we barely understand how natural morphological variation is controlled. So I was excited to see this paper out of the van der Knaap and Francis labs. In it, they review some of the known levers by which tomato plants control fruit shape and investigate their historical appearance.

I have a yard!

I spent the day moving the first of my stuff into the new house I'm renting. I'm very excited to finally be somewhere besides a one bedroom apartment. The yard's pretty shady but presents some interesting gardening opportunities that I'm working over in my head.

Putting up Hay

It used to be a common sight for me this time of year (on the way to the maize experimental fields) to see straw and hay being raked into windrows by hay rakes (video 1 2). Though most of us tend to use these words interchangeably, hay is a crop grown specifically for animal feed and straw is the leftover stems and leaves of a harvested grain that may be used for animal feed, bedding or construction. Common annual and perennial hay crops include legumes (e.g. alfalfa and clover) and grasses (e.g. timothy, brome, orchard grass and tall fescue). Straw usually comes from whatever grain is being grown in your area (e.g. wheat or barley).