From farm to fork, diversity can make the whole difference. The science of planting mixtures and populations of different legumes is nearly 100 years old, rooted in the experience of millennia. Mixtures and populations have a number of advantages. They can adapt their flowering time to their growing locations, symbiotically they continuously evolve towards higher and notably more stable yields from year to year and they are more resistant to diseases than uniform varieties. Salvatore Ceccarelli, a pioneer of participatory and diversity-based plant breeding, will present and discuss examples of these advantages using the current work of Global Bean Project partner ALSIA, the agricultural development and innovation agency of the Lucana Region in Southern Italy.
8.5.12, themed by Refined