342nd Meeting : Tuesday, January 17th 2012 : A talk and presentation by Professor Lindsay Falvey

At an AIST (Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology) seminar last November, Andre Drenth (University of Queensland) gave a talk entitled ‘The Impact of Globalisation and Plant Diseases on Food Security’. This was a fascinating history of agriculture, input technologies, trade, biosecurity, pathogens, and the importance of crop protection.

The lessons from the talk are summarised in a slide which stated:

• By far the most efficient way to improve production to be able to feed the world we need to reduce crop losses, currently estimated at 42%
• Agricultural production needs to increase 2.3% a year to just meet global food demand (at present we increase it by 1.5% a year)

We are facing the greatest global challenge ever as a discipline

I asked Andre if I can send the talk to Pestnet members. Rather than the PDF file which is rather large, and there are some copyright issues, he has suggested people who are interested in this subject can go to:

Watch the video presentation now on APSNET

Andre made a similar presentation on food security and plant pathology at an APS meeting in the US, and it has been made into a webcast.

It is well worth watching!

While Europeans may miss their traditional green and red holly over Christmas in Chiang Mai people from the Horn of Africa can find one of their most precious exports growing in abundance  in the wooded hills south of the road to Pai at Sop Poeng in Mae Daeng District just a few kilometres East of  the Mok Fah Waterfall.

Here in a large area of forest managed by the Watershed Unit of the Forest Department native trees including notably larger Terminalia bellirica have been retained and others , especially Dipterocarpus turbinatus have been planted. The understorey has been greatly modified but appears to be free of weeds and everywhere Coffee shrubs are planted.

If you visit be sure to go and see the trees mentioned above and also many Hopea odorata seedlings growing there for community planting in well watered stream side environments. Perhaps your village has such a place and you might ask for some to take away.  You might even consider asking for trees for the Tree Help for Flooded Siam II project?

Staff of the Forest Department have warmed to this idea and arrangements have been made for the Nakhorn Sawan Forest Nursery – คุณ สุจิตรา หัวหน้าสวนรุกขชาตินครสวรรค์ โทร.089-4370059 – to receive plants donated by Chiang Mai forest nurseries.

In Nakhorn Sawan the trees will be transferred to large potting bags to grow to a size where the survival after planting should be high. See City Now for the latest on this story.

The central plain of Siam once was dominated by great trees of the Dipterocarpaceae family, particularly Dipterocarpus alatus (Yang Na) and Hopea odorata  (Takien) both of which have this year been grown in large numbers in Chiang Mai.  For example the Heuy Keow Nursery & Arboretum have over 2000 Yang Na and 1000 Takien, Khun Nikom of the Chang Peuk Hotel has around 10,000 Yang Na grown from seed collected at Wat Chedi Luang and the Watershed Unit Nursery at Sop Poeng , Mae Daeng has 5000 Takien seedlings.

If we estimate 30,000 seedlings were sent for planting and just to suppose they were planted in the fashion of the avenue on the ChiangMai-Lamphun road the number would be sufficient to line only 225 km of road. Considering there are many thousands of kilometres of highways, minor roads streams and canals on the plain finding suitable places for planting should not be difficult.

The present problem we face is how to transport the trees from Chiang Mai.

People returning towards Bangkok after the New Year holidays with space in their pick-up trucks are being asked to volunteer to take a load of seedlings to Nakhorn Sawan.

Please contact Khun Jumpot of the Nurseries Section on 08-1910-2130 , or Ricky 08-4985-9668 to speak in English, if you are able to help, either at the time suggested or at a later date.

One year on and we see the results – accelerated destruction of trees and totally asphalt surrounds of the two new municipal buildings – City Hall & the Bus Station.

Folks may also have noticed in 2010 the ever present crew of TV Burapa who conducted countless interviews. Where they ended up is anyone’s guess but just last November 2011 the crew reappeared and requested an interview with tree seed collector and member of Gum Hak Doi Suthep Ricky Ward, and a photo from that encounter appears below.

The afternoon discussion was all about local trees and seeds and an edited version will appear on TV Channel 7 this Monday 26th in the evening at 23:45 hrs, as part of the “Krabi Meur 1″ program.

• 26 ธันวาคม 2554
• 23:45
• รายการ กระบี่มือหนึ่ง

I asked her about Don Takien (Hopea odorata), the famous spirit tree which one lined all our rivers and used for making war canoes. “Oh they are all long gone” she said.

Yang Na seedlings at the nursery on the road to Ob Khan National Park

I might add that the same is true of the great Yang Na (Dipterocarpus alatus), which the King has successfully grown at Suan Chitlada in large numbers. Former Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun once told a Community Forest meeting how he wished to see Yang Na planted everywhere in his native Bangkok.

My neighbor suggested that the best way for us in the north to help flood sufferers is to start growing lots of trees for their gardens, especially fruit trees, and to start now.

I would add that as this has been a year of abundant seed production of Yang Na trees and that our forest nurseries have them in abundance, that come Songkran time they all be shipped to Nakorn Sawan and beyond to be planted  to grace the roads and klongs and in years to come provide timber for building in the old style.

This should please a lot more people than just Khun Anand and His Majesty.

Can anyone suggest which organisations are best placed to organise this assistance? (without turning it into an exercise in corruption)

(Note: Yang Na trees are grown in their hundreds of thousands here in Chiang Mai and Lamphun due to the ease of collection of seed from the giant avenue of over 800 trees stretching from Chiang Mai to Sarapee. This year 27,000 seeds were collected from one giant tree at Wat Chedi Luang. Yang Na (Dipterocarpus alatus) is a useful plantation species but as it is not known to grow wild in the forest further north than the south of Phrae province it is not recommended for environmental planting Lanna.  Rather at lower elevations, along streams and on the northern flood plains the indigenous Yang Daeng (Dipterocarpus turbinatus) should be preferred. )

Friday 21st October 2011 @ JJ Market meeting hall – (located near Tesco Lotus Kam Tien) @ 2 p.m

a planning meeting for Thai Environment Day 5th December 2011.  &

Ricky Ward from Australia

will give a lecture on

Plants for erosion control

Hi Ricky,

I have just been watching a documentary called “Up in Smoke” on the UK Channel 4 network – possibly available on-line. It tells the story of a British scientist, Mike Hands who has been working in Central America, mostly Honduras, for some years trying to reduce the negative effects of “slash & burn” cultivation. Apparently besides destroying the rain forests, slash& burn puts much more carbon into the atmosphere each year than all forms of carbon-emitting transport put together. He found that by planting a tree called Inga  he could hold the nutrients in the soil.

The method of crop planting is called “alley cropping” as the crops (mostly maize & beans) are planted in “alleyways” through the Inga. Unlike traditional slash and burn where you get one good crop after the burn then the soil fertility drops off so you have to cut a new patch, with Inga the fertility remains pretty constant enabling multiple crops and the the subsistence farmers can remain in one place.

For whatever reason he has been unable to convince the world that this system works, though he has had considerable success with farmers in Honduras who once they saw the system in action were quick to adopt it as it provides them with sustainable crops, involves much less work than slash and burn every year and also enables them to stay put on one bit of land rather than moving on every few years. I understand that Inga species are all native to South & Central America and belong to the Mimosa family. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find a native S. E. Asian tree that would do the same thing!

The above is a very short précis of a much more complicated story but with half of Borneo, Indonesia, Thailand & Lao going up in smoke every year this approach must be worth investigating.

Let me know when you’ve cracked it!

Cheers, Iain

Farmland erosion in Laos , September 2011

Well Iain, there have been attempts at cracking the problem here e.g. promising trials of Peltophorum dasyrrhachis, a native of these parts but to the traveller’s eye no implementation of alley cropping.

Perhaps some of our farming readers can bring us up-to-date?

Click on these pics and zoom in to see the detail.

Here Nancy, a new International Citizen of Chiang Mai, poses with her first plant and a heavy iron crow bar.  Even though the soil was moist we still needed the help of Ian and the crow bar to dig through the tough layer of fill that covers most of the land in the park.

We have yet to identify Nancy’s plant although we know it is a member of the pea family. The picture on the right shows one in flower at Huey Teng Tao beside the prickly Mimosa invisa, a weed we always need to keep under control.

The planting area was under big exotic Rain Trees many of which are dying and in time will be replaced by the indigenous trees we have planted. We hope that the shade will help bring the new plants through the coming hot season.

We also planted a number of Clerodendrum viscosum plants given by Eric Danell of Dokmai Garden.  We dug these out of a lawn and grew them in bags for a month before planting out.

This photo was taken at the height of the hot dry season of March 2010 so the leaves are showing a thirty look. Come May they sport black fruit about 5 mm across backed by red star sepals to put on a bright show in the bush.

PLEASE do come back to see some more interesting People pictures when they arrive.

Photo Gallery

Here are some of our favourites so far:

What might the cause be? No sign of insect attack on this exotic unpalatable species. It is said there is only one species of native bird that will consider nesting in a Eucy so not say parrots tearing off leaves and flowers as seen in Australia. No sign of widespread ring barking and hardly likely there is a campaign to poison the trees.

Well what is different this year that may be the culprit. If my mother were still alive she would surely blame the weather. This year has seen the longest wet season in my 12 years in Thailand, with good rains in May, excellent for planting native trees. One might expect the Eucalyptus camaldulensis, also known as the River Red Gum to be prospering. Yes they love to grow near rivers and around swamps and flooding spreads their seed but the Red Gum is also drought tolerant and like Teak needs a period when the ground is dry.

Australia, the land of the Eucalyptus, has seen widespread death from causes as diverse as insect attack and soil compaction by cattle, but the most insidious has been the root fungus Phytophthora cinnamoni which is spread by water in the ground. Can we have advice from a tree pathologist in Thailand?

Seed production of some species in the Dipterocarp family can vary greatly between years and a year where large number of trees produce many seed is known as a mast year.

The year 2011  was a mast year for Hopea in Chiang Mai and the Huey Keow Arboretum nursery is growing young trees from locally collected seed.

Ten kilometres to the north at Huey Teng Tao there is a stream with two old Hopea trees. In the past five years I can recall seeing neither seed nor seedlings from these trees despite the fact the environment is suitable for growing Hopeas, until that is, fire comes along.  Hopeas have been successfully grown along two of the streams leading into the dam at Huey Teng Tao with Gum Hak Doi Suthep planting nursery raised trees and also seed directly into the moist earth along the stream.

The picture, taken 3rd September 2011, shows young Hopeas growing in the moisture along the stream edges.

Many seedlings were also observed up the slope and a little upstream from the parent tree. Only two old trees from the original Hopea dominated gallery forest remain and apart from this years extraordinary recruitment no other Hopeas are to be found. Of the number which had been planted in recent years and grown well, all were killed by fire in 2010.

Fire is not the only threat to the forest here. Both the remaining old Hopeas now face death from the construction of check dams, by Rotary International of Chiang Mai, which have caused massive erosion .

Urgent work is required to demolish these dams and place stones and sand around the roots of the old trees. This requires that the concrete be manually broken with hammers and extreme  care taken ensure Hopea seedlings are not trampled or buried.

The lesson here and also from elswhere in the Doi Suthep-Pui national Park is that check dams do not produce the claimed benefits to the environment. Rather they create erosion, disrupt the natural stream ecology of invertebrates travelling along the stream and divert money and a great deal of well intentioned effort from useful work such as weed control.

At the beginning of August many seedlings were seen growing in sand washed down from upstream.

These have now vanished beneath a new layer of sand washed down in the latest storms and the volume of sand is high because erosion continues unabated around the check dams.

This picture on the left was taken in May when hundreds of seedlings were observed.

Also growing here is Mikania micranthra or Mile-A-Minute. This rampant weed needs to be controlled to prevent destruction of young trees.

The area shown in these photos is of special significance for the study of forest regeneration in Chiang Mai.

As the land is managed by the Thai Army it is to be hoped that the management cooperate with Rotary International, CMU researchers and community volunteers to cordon off this area from destructive trampling, remove the dams, prevent fire and control weeds. We may then have a true Ecotourism site worthy of visiting by people birds and forest animals.