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Out of the Scientist's Garden – A Story of Water and Food
By Richard Stirzaker
CSIRO Publishing
January 2010
Out of the Scientist's Garden is written for anyone who wants to understand food and water a little better – for those growing vegetables in a garden, food in a subsistence plot or crops on vast irrigated plains. It is also for anyone who has never grown anything before but has wondered how we will feed a growing population in a world of shrinking resources.
Although a practising scientist in the field of water and agriculture, the author has written, in story form accessible to a wide audience, about the drama of how the world feeds itself. The book starts in his own fruit and vegetable garden, exploring the 'how and why' questions about the way things grow, before moving on to stories about soil, rivers, aquifers and irrigation. The book closes with a brief history of agriculture, how the world feeds itself today and how to think through some of the big conundrums of modern food production.
Watering the world from a Canberra backyard
Richard's garden takes up about every inch of soil on his block, and none of it is wasted either in producing crops or for providing data for his experiments. See the excellent audio slide show on this garden here.
By Jim Trail
666ABC Canberra
10 February, 2010
Excerpt:
Richard Stirzaker is a man obsessed with water, and turning it into food.
He's been involved with it ever since growing up in South Africa, surrounded by vegetables – a habit he's carried around the southern hemisphere and that has flourished on his quarter-acre block in Canberra's northern suburbs.
There are very few centimetres of soil on his O'Connor block that aren't working hard to turn water into food, be they grapes, peaches, pumpkins, or even eggs as processed by the resident chickens. But where Richard's garden differs to most back yard vege patches is in the cabling.
Richard's garden is fully wired, moisture detectors here, a solar panel above, more equipment over there – and he can check the lot from the internet.
Richard is a CSIRO scientist, who has taken the old adage, "Do something you love, and you'll never work a day in your life", to new levels. One of the very handy tools he's developed to assist gardening is the Full Stop Wetting Front Detector.
Developed at the CSIRO, it's a device that indicates when water has reached the bottom of the root zone and is hence enough water to provide adequate irrigation for growing without waste.
The garden around Richard's house would put many a commercial market garden to shame, the produce is fresh, full and beautiful so it's no surprise to find that, in a former life, Richard's spent time working on market gardens where, in terms of sales, the visual value of a crop is at least as important as the nutritional value.
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