Murray Lark 🇿🇼
@geostatlark.bsky.social
Statistician, studying soils & crops in Africa. Collaborating on history of soil surveys in colonial Africa. Professor of Environmetrics, University of Nottingham. Lay Dominican, Marxist, Zimbabwean. https://sites.google.com/view/murraylark/home
"One previous attempt to engage Trump on the status of the [nuclear] talks deteriorated when the president switched the conversation to one of his favourite topics: shoes" How ignorance, misunderstanding and obfuscation ended Iran nuclear talks www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
How ignorance, misunderstanding and obfuscation ended Iran nuclear talks
Negotiators had reached agreement on key issues despite Trump team’s idiosyncratic approach. Two days later, war began
theguardian.com
A blog on the CABI website about a new tool for designing networks of on-farm experiments. Part of a strategic collaboration Rothamsted, Universities of Nottingham and Warwick,IITA, Kano University and Savanna Agriculture Research Institute 🇳🇬🇬🇭 www.cabi.org/news/introdu...
Introducing ICoN - CABI.org
The AgVACS project has created a cutting edge, multi‑metric tool for designing and evaluating cereal–legume systems. The ICoN tool has been developed as part of the AgVACS project (Climate-Smart Agron...
cabi.org
The story of Farage and Putin, told by British-Ukrainian soldier Shaun Pinner on a destroyed apartment block in Kyiv.
Here's a good news story from 2025 you may have missed! In Kenya, the laws that criminalise farmers for saving their own seeds were successfully challenged and declared unconstitutional. More on why this sets a positive precedent. ⤵️ https://bit.ly/49fFq8Q
Landmark ruling in Kenya allows farmers to save their own seeds
A group of farmers supported by civil society organisations, including CAFOD's partner BIBA-Kenya, have successfully challenged Kenya’s seed laws that criminalised farmers for saving their own seeds.
cafod.org.uk
Morning in Tamale, northern Ghana. Here for a meeting of the AgVACS project on legume crops for savanna environments.
rdcu.be/eNBga New paper out in Sustainable Agriculture: the design of on-farm trials
Designing on-farm trials: an example with interventions to improve micronutrient status of grain crops
npj Sustainable Agriculture - Designing on-farm trials: an example with interventions to improve micronutrient status of grain crops
rdcu.be
High point of the week was realising a long ambition to visit Broome Bridge over the Royal Canal in Dublin, where Hamilton discovered the rule for quaternions.
Multiple soil and landscape properties are associated with the spatial variation of selenium concentration in maize grain in Malawi doi.org/10.1088/2976... via @ioppublishing.bsky.social
Multiple soil and landscape properties are associated with the spatial variation of selenium concentration in maize grain in Malawi - IOPscience
Multiple soil and landscape properties are associated with the spatial variation of selenium concentration in maize grain in Malawi, Nalivata, Patson C, Ligowe, Ivy S, Chagumaira, Christopher, Mossa, ...
doi.org
A new paper with colleagues in Zambia in the InSTAnZa project. The moral of the story is "never throw away old soil maps just because you have a new one" authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
A new paper out of the CEPHaS project: measuring water retention in soils from conservation agriculture trials and using the Van Genuchten parameters to model infiltration. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
aje.io/yvague This week the Israeli ministry of science & innovation asked me to review a proposal on technology for improved land management. I told them not while the IDF continues it's murderous campaigns. And this week we also heard how 95% of Gaza's farmland has been laid waste by Israel. 🇵🇸
More than 95 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land unusable, UN warns
Israeli attacks on land, wells and greenhouses exacerbating the already critical risk of famine in Gaza, the FAO says.
aje.io
In our latest #OA #HistoryMatters piece, the team of Milo Gough, Bryson Nkhoma, Elias Chirwa, @davidwilsonhist.bsky.social, Charles Knapp, Tracy Morse, and Wapulumuka Mulwafu explore the history of present day #Fisheries management in #LakeMalawi: bit.ly/4lmkjoT
£440 for a two-day meeting in Manchester, about £10 short of what EGU costs for 5 days in Vienna. What does British Society of Soil Science think it is for, @pdhallett.bsky.social ?
‘The pope is Peruvian’: elation in country where pontiff served as bishop www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m....
‘The pope is Peruvian’: elation in country where pontiff served as bishop
Leo XIV celebrated as second Latin American pope having spent many years in Peru’s church
theguardian.com
“‘Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers,’ Francis wrote in his last meditations on Good Friday. ‘Theirs is the construction site of Hell.’”
This, on capitalism’s devaluing human life, is important.
Resist Britain's slide into an anti-human dystopia
The shameful passage of the assisted dying Bill where safeguards have been all but jettisoned is symptomatic of a hyper-liberalised society where the cult of individualism reigns supreme, argues KEVIN...
morningstaronline.co.uk
Ornithological distractions in Harare this morning. Red eyed doves, laughing doves, red waxbill, bulbul, weaver bird and a purple-crested turaco (lourie).
theconversation.com/us-isnt-firs.... The Tories trashed Dfid's international reputation for efficiency and expertise. Labour came in and decided that the Development portfolio was a part-time Government job. And then they brought in swinging cuts. Not sure why I wasted my time voting for them.
US isn’t first country to dismantle its foreign aid office − here’s what happened after the UK killed its version of USAID
In 2020, British Conservatives cited cost-cutting to force the UK’s foreign aid office into a merger. Five years later, it hasn’t recovered its budget or expertise.
theconversation.com
Inconsistent approaches to how sex is recorded in publicly-funded research has led to “widespread loss” of data over past decade, warns government-commissioned review by @profalices.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/news/widespr...
‘Widespread loss’ of sex data in gender question confusion
‘Default target’ of sex questions should be sex at birth, with ‘male’ and ‘female’ the possible answers, says government-commissioned review
timeshighereducation.com
Kopjes at Chiremba bear Harare. See Ollier's Two cycle theory of tropical pedagogy for one hypothesis about their origin
Currently back home in Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 doing a teaching block at UZ. My walk back each evening through northern Harare passes jacaranda and other exotic trees, but pleased to see this Erythrina abysinnica, an honest indigenous African tree, holding its own.
Loving and Merciful God, We come before You in prayer, lifting up Your servant, Pope Francis, in his time of need. cafod.org.uk/pray/prayer-...
Prayer for the health of Pope Francis
We join our voices with all those around the world who are praying for Pope Francis' health.
cafod.org.uk
Harare limbering up for more rain, while I think about dambos.
The people of Europe stand with Ukraine against the threat of a false peace as much as brutal war. Because of our shared history. Because of our shared future. Because it is just. Because it is necessary. And because they deserve nothing less. Don't abandon them. #SlavaUkraini youtu.be/u8GftJEa4_8
"Don't Abandon Them" - Marsh Family adaptation of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" about Ukraine
YouTube video by Marsh Family
youtu.be
Visiting IITA at Ibadan, Nigeria, with @Rothamsted colleagues for project planning. A beautiful site with forest and wetland as well as field plots and labs.
This new paper, with colleagues at World Bank, uses pilot survey data to assess options for augmenting standard "household surveys" with soil sampling to provide information on soil quality to go with dietary and socio-economic data. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S00…
