Paul Polak On Small-Scale Garden Solutions

I heard a great interview with Paul Polak on Fresh Air last night, relevant to home gardeners because he helps farmers in the developing world by focusing on those working "tiny" plots, who he says are the vast majority of the world's farmers.

Polak said that 90% of the world's engineers are developing farming tools for 10% of the world's farms, that modern drip irrigation supplies were designed for giant tracts of land, and that small farmers (and thus gardeners) need totally different solutions if they want their application of technology to be cost-efficient - foot-operated water pumps, cheaper hoses for low-pressure drip irrigation, and so on. This is something Wendell Berry talked about a lot in his wonderful book of essays The Gift of Good Land, but Polak seems to have more practical examples and solutions under his belt.

Polak runs a multi-million-dollar international development foundation and has a book out, Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Logging Weather Data

Amazon.com has this $75 LaCrosse Weather Station on sale for $25 today only. I'm tempted by it because it's almost what I want, but not quite - it seems odd that it won't tell you the barometric pressure (although I am guessing this is how it forecasts the weather "trend") and I'd really like a device that will log data that can be retrieved for use on your computer - ideally, automatically, although this is a lot to ask on the Mac platform, so I'd settle for a manual download if it would store at least a week's worth of data.

I doubt that establishing my own personal climate normals is really that useful. Another potentially useful feature, that of measuring the temperatures of different areas of your yard (to identify microclimates that warm up earlier in the spring or stay warm later in the fall) is also curtailed by the streamlined features: Although the station can accept data from up to three individual temperature sensors, it automatically combines these for an average reading. It calls this "more accurate," but gardeners know better. Here's a link to the manual (PDF).

Anyone out there work with temperature sensors and computers, or datalogging environmental data in general? Or has anyone found an off-the-shelf product that does at least some of these things? It's a long-term goal of ours to set up a simple system that will give us some around-the-yard data I can really use.

In later posts we'll be tackling a variety of DIY weather reading projects - maybe we can find someone who can help us add the tech side to the list!