This report from Christian Aid argues that the debate on biofuels needs to focus not on whether some biofuels can deliver or are better than others, but instead on the policy model that is pushing biofuels, which it argues is fundamentally flawed.

Researchers at the University of Nevada have developed a new process for producing biodiesel from commercial feather meal. The process is described in their paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Kondamudi N, Strull J, Misra M and Mohapatra S. (2009). A Green Process for Producing Biodiesel from Feather Meal. Agric. Food Chem., 2009, 57 (14), pp 6163 - 6166.

Burke M B, Lobell D B, Guarino L (2009). Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation. Global Environmental Change, Volume 19, Issue 3, Pages 317-325.

The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has launched Paddock to Plate: policy propositions for sustaining food and farming systems. This is the second and final phase of the Future Food and Farming project, commissioned by the ACF and undertaken by Andrew Campbell of Triple Helix Consulting.

This report, published in March 2009 by the Australian government proposes that organic soil carbon can be divided into at least three ‘pools’ according to how fast it breaks down and is replaced. The pools are commonly divided into: fast (e.g. annual), slow (e.g. decadal) and passive (e.g. millennial). For carbon sequestration (long-term storage) and carbon trading purposes, it is especially desirable to increase the total amount of carbon in the pools that break down slowly (e.g. the slow and passive pools).