Manu Saunders writes:  Growing  just one crop, known as monoculture, is a relatively easy, common and efficient way to produce food and fibre.

But international research shows that these monocultures can be bad for the environment and production through effects on soil quality, erosion, plants and animals, and ultimately declining crop yields.

Monocultures don’t exist in nature. This diversity of plant species and sizes supports diverse wildlife communities, and this diversity supports ecosystem services such as pollination and biological control.

When this diversity disappears, the results can be disastrous. The Dust Bowl years on the American Great Plains showed us what can happen when natural ecosystems are overwhelmed by intensive, single-crop farming.

Large fruit tree plantations differ from field crops because they are permanently embedded in the landscape for more than 10 years. Therefore, they may have more serious, long-term impacts on the environment than an annual crop.

If a plantation is inhospitable to an animal species, it won’t be able to move through the plantation to find food or shelter. This essentially creates a landscape barrier for that species.

Such effects have been found on bird, ground beetle, reptile and marsupial species living in landscapes dominated by pine plantations in south-eastern Australia.

Unlike pine trees, fruit trees rely on insect pollination, an ecosystem service, to produce fruit. With all the agricultural stressors influencing honey bee colony losses in other parts of the world, understanding how wild pollinators respond to farming practices is critical.

In the mallee woodlands and shrublands of southern Australia, probably one of the most understudied and important ecosystems for conservation, almond plantations are rapidly expanding.

Natural ecosystems like mallees are rich in diversity, unlike the monocultures that replace them.

Research from California on commercial almond plantations shows that numbers of wild pollinator and parasitoid insects (unmanaged insects that enhance yields through pollination and biological control) increased with plant diversity..

What does this diversity mean? Monoculture crops are intensively managed to remove as many plants that aren’t crops as possible. In the middle of a monoculture almond plantation, for instance, you will see little else but almond trees and bare soil for hundreds of hectares around you.

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A sustainable farm isn’t just efficient to manage or designed to produce maximum yields per hectare. It also depends on conservation of biodiversity, ecosystem function and diversification of crops and/or livestock.

Research and development of agroecological systems are now internationally recognised as vital to sustainable food and fibre production.

With our unique natural environment and strong agricultural communities, Australia is uniquely-placed to contribute to the global discussion on sustainable agriculture.

Tanvi Madan writes: Some quick thoughts on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to China thus far, following the release of the Joint Statement, and Modi’s remarks at the Great Hall of the People, at Tsinghua University, and at a bilateral forum of state and provincial leaders:

Winner: Social media—it’s been ubiquitous, from Modi joining China’s Weibo to the Modi selfie with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to the continuation of the Modi-looking-at-things meme.

Loser: Panchsheel. It’d been a bit odd that India had continued to choose to mention Panchsheel and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence—principles that are remembered by many in India as being honored by China in the breach than in the observance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There was even a shout-out to it in the Modi-Xi joint statement in September 2014. But it’s missing in action in the 2015 joint statement and seems to have been replaced by this:

The leaders agreed that the process of the two countries pursuing their respective national developmental goals and security interests must unfold in a mutually supportive manner with both sides showing mutual respect and sensitivity to each other’s concerns, interests and aspirations. This constructive model of relationship between the two largest developing countries, the biggest emerging economies and two major poles in the global architecture provides a new basis for pursuing state-to-state relations to strengthen the international system.   Modi’s Trip to China

Are Bitcoins Digiital Gold? This is the title of Nathaniel Popper’s intriguing new book released today in the US by Harper Collins.  The subtitle: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaries Trying to Reinvent Money.

Although Popper uses the word money, his reference to gold in the title suggests that Bitcoins are a commodity.  Debate has raged between these two definitions of the new virtual currency.

When paper money was first created, it was backed by a commodity.  Not so today.  There is no ‘gold standard.’ The traditional definition of a currency is that it is a medium of exchange and a store of value. The traditional definition of a commodity is that it is a nearly-perfectly fungible good. A commodity could be used as a currency if it is convenient to do so. Likewise, a currency can become a commodity under certain conditions.

We will look more closely at all the facets of Bitcoins as described by Popper in a series of articles this week.

Critics of the Bitcoin are large financial institutions who do not want to be up-ended by an upstart digital financial system with a new currency.    A new way of banking might not require the Jamie Dimon’s of the world, or the JP Morgan Chase’s. In fact, Jamie Dimon, perhaps to distract people from his problems, attacked virtual currency in Davos in January of 2014,

Change in the world is happening rapidly, and while no one expects Bank of America to cave to techies from Silicon Valley soon, it could happen much sooner than we think.  The banking industry watches nervously as tech firms like Apple take on the banks.  Apple has 400 million consumers with credit cards attached to iTunes. In many different ways, tech firms can deeply disrupt the financial services sector.

Bitcoins cut even deeper into the banking system, because they have the potential to provide a new way to store money and then spend (or trade) it.

The first parry of banks against the bitcoin operators is that they are crooks.  After Libor and sub-prime mortgages that seems on odd word for the banking ‘criminals’ to lob at others.  The US Department of Justice is seeking criiminal pleas from Barclay’s, CItibank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.  The Silk Road drug dealers on a bitcoin site who the FBI hauled in may just have been the rogues in this game.  Many Bitcoin players seem serious and honest, although some are over-the-top libertarians.

To be sure, the technology that drives Bitcoins insures anonymity. Yet anonymity is not always attached to criminal intent.  In fact, as Popper weaves his tale, we meet a host of dedicated technology experts who are fascinatied by the problem of creating a new currency and seem not at all interested in crimincal possibilities.

Popper described the structure of bicoins efficiently and clearly.  Encyrption is step one.  Numbers and letters are in long sequences, but there is nothing particularly unusual about signing up for a bitcoin account.  What is really brilliant is the ‘blockchain,’ which we will devote one article to describing.

Blockchains are at the heart of the matter for a new banking system.  Popper describes a meeting between one of the early entrepreneurs in the Bitcoin field with Bill Gates.  He approached Gates at an event and asked to speak with him about Bitcoins.  At first, Gates sloughed him off.  But when more detials of the possibilities of offering free banking to the nundreds of millions of under-served people in the developing world was suggested, Gates said he wanted to know more.  And he is presumably thinking about the prospect right now.

No, Bitcoins are not the evil Wall Street and the bankers would have us believe.  The system holds promise for cheaper and faster banking in the future.  It will probably not come in the forms avaialable today, but so much capital, including lead Silicon Valley firm Andressen Horowitz, has been invested already, that it’s hard not to see this as a very good idea that will be shaped for easy use in the future.

Remember online banking and the ATM?  After John Reed earned his MIT degrees at the Sloan school, he went to work for Citibank.  In 1967, the bank commissioned a report on the future of the industry. One finding raised the question of what impact computers might have on banking. The Citibank president told Reed, “You went to MIT, surely you understand computers…Read this and take some time and figure out what this means for the banking industry.”

Reed, who had only written a few lines of Fortran during his MIT studies, took a year to study the problem, returned to MIT to study with several faculty members, and visited equipment manufacturers who were developing computers. And he decided that online, interactive systems would have the most influence on banking, akin to the airline reservations systems then being developed. Reed launched a company, Citibank Systems Inc., on the edge of the MIT campus, since he thought he could hire good people there. “It was a very unusual project because we had a solution looking for a problem,” Reed noted.

Moving money online was an early successful application, and it still earns millions of dollars for banks every year. On the retail side, Reed’s startup looked at branches and how to replace cash registers with speedier equipment. The developments allow Citibank’s to take the lead in issuing credit cards that allowed customers to transact business without carrying cash.

For Automated Teller Machine (ATMs), the main proposition was this: “We decided that the electronic dispensing of cash was going to be a real change agent,” he said. In 1970, Citibank had 1,600,000 customers in New York City so that became the test site. Reed moved his operation to California to combine his startup team with a group of engineers who had just developed a related system. They designed computers and multiplexers and leased telephone lines from AT&T. And then they had to figure out how human beings were going to interact with the machines….and that was just the beginning.

Who among the bankers today will switch and cut bait and do what John Reed did for Citi?  That remains to be seen.  But the cast of characters in the Popper book is a start.

Tomorrow: Popper describes how the Bitcoin system works.

Malcolm Brabant writes:  Greenland’s Inuit chefs, clad in sealskin outfits and trousers fashioned from polar bear fur, will not be offended if MEPs decline morsels of the whiskered marine mammal from the grill. But the chefs hope that their planned cookery session will help to convince European lawmakers to reverse what they regard as a misguided ban on the importation of seal products that is driving a centuries-old way of life to the edge of extinction.

Exports of seal pelts have plummeted by 90% since the introduction of the European ban in 2009. The impact on subsistence economies in Greenland’s 60 coastal communities has been catastrophic. “It’s a tragic situation for us,” says Karl Lyberth, a hunter who used to be Greenland’s minister of fishing, agriculture and food. “A lot of people in the EU don’t understand our way of life.”

A delegation of Greenland seal hunters will board a bus in Copenhagen on Monday for the journey to Strasbourg to lobby parliamentarians.

They are steeling themselves for a clash of cultures and a struggle to change public perceptions. The hunters’ main hurdle is to overcome the image promulgated by animal welfare campaigners of helpless cuddly baby seals being clubbed to death on ice floes in Canada.

International public outrage at the annual Canadian cull contributed in no small way to the European moratorium. “To a large extent it’s the last call for a lot of the hunters,’ says Rasmus Holm of Inuit Sila, the Greenlandic Hunters and Fishermen’s Association. “If the current crisis continues, they won’t have any alternative but to claim social security.”

Is Happiness a Factor in Business Success?  Tuugi Chuluun and Carol Graham write:  Economists—and other social scientists—are now using a burgeoning body of research based on surveys of reported well-being or, more colloquially put, happiness. They are studying areas as diverse as the effects of income, inflation, unemployment, exercising, smoking, and marital status on well-being. They are also exploring the effects of well-being on individuals’ attitudes about and investments in the future.

The results are not surprising: smoking, inflation, and unemployment (particularly the latter) are bad for well-being; while income, exercise, and marriage are, on average, good for well-being. Individuals with higher levels of well-being on average have better future outcomes in the health, labor market, and social arenas. The latter is due to innate optimism and intrinsic motivation on the one hand, and the capacity of individuals with higher levels of well-being to make choices about what kind of lives they want to lead on the other. In short, numerous studies show that higher levels of well-being are associated with all sorts of positive outcomes.

It is important to note that the use of these metrics requires methodological precision. Scholars do not ask respondents if particular things make them happy or unhappy. Instead, they use large-scale surveys with the well-being question of interest up front in the survey. They control for all sorts of socio-demographic traits (such as income, gender, age, education, and employment status) and assess how well-being levels vary with the variable of interest, holding all other things equal.
But does any of this have relevance for the business world? Here is what we examined:
Does happiness play a role in corporate economic behavior?
We recently explored whether well-being is relevant to our understanding of firm behavior and found, rather remarkably, that it is.  Does Happiness Improve Business

Karsten Strauss writes:  We looked at 35 promising companies and subjected them to our own grading formula, keeping in mind the track records and skills of the founding teams, and chose 25 startups we think have billion-dollar valuations in their futures

What we learned was that technology is transforming industries the world over and investors are backing young companies that promise to change the face of e-commerce, food tech, financial services, and the enterprise.

We took a look at some of the trends we’re seeing in the high-value startup space. What industries are the startups dismantling?  Why are  venture-backed companies are taking longer to go public, how dpes that affects valuations, and what venture capitalists are doing in response.

Among some of the top startups we’re taking a closer look at is Tanium, the product of father and son cofounders, became the latest $1 billion startup at the end of March (S David and Orion Hindawi have now received over $140 million from Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm’s biggest single bet ever, to reinvent cyber security for massive corporations. FORBES’ reporter Brian Solomon took a look at how Tanium’s back-end architecture lets clients like Visa, Amazon, Best Buy and the U.S. Department of Defense view and control every one of their hundreds of thousands of networked computing devices in seconds.

Docker also made the winners circle. In just two years, Docker has become one of the most popular open-source projects in tech, its app containers downloaded more than 300 million times. Docker is an open platform for developers and sytems admininstrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud. The big enterprise players are lining up to partner with it from IBM to Microsoft and VMware. And it’s just raised $95 million at valuation just under $1 billion from top investors in venture as well as Coatue and Goldman Sachs.

Personal loan startup, Avant (formerly AvantCredit), has been racking up customers by taking the headache out of getting a quick handout. Loan Star) Revenue grew 971% to $75 million in 2014, and CEO Al Goldstein says Avant can more than triple that this year as it surpasses its 200,000^th customer. Its valuation so far? We estimate $875 million.

Cyber security,  an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud and a personal loan business. 

The Rocky Road from Iolsationism to Globalization:

Scott Wong writes: In the US, swing-state Democrats are sounding the alarm that Obama’s free trade proposals, backed by their GOP opponents, would ship U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas and lead to greater unemployment at home.

Democrat Jason Kander, who is challenging Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), blasted the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a “bad deal for Missouri.”

A progressive group led by former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who is polling ahead of GOP Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, called the TPP “ruinous for our middle class.”

Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (D) said trade policy would be one of the “major defining issues” in his race against GOP Sen. Rob Portman, who served as the top trade official under former President George W. Bush.

Portman voted for the fast-track bill in committee but says he still wants to see language barring Chinese currency manipulation before he supports it on the Senate floor.  Portman hit back at Strickland, accusing the former governor of impeding the growth of the Buckeye State’s export industry.

The trade fight has made for unusual alliances in the Senate, where McConnell on Tuesday praised Obama’s efforts to win Democratic support for the bill.

In Pennsylvania, Sen. Pat Toomey (R), the former head of the free-market, free trade Club for Growth, voted for fast-track authority in the Finance Committee. But one Democratic challenger, Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski, said he’d fight the Pacific trade deal to protect jobs in the Keystone State.

Kander, Missouri’s 34-year-old Democratic secretary of State, blasted Obama administration for negotiating the Pacific trade deal “in secret.” He argued that Missouri’s auto industry has been doing fine without a new trade pact, adding about 20,000 auto manufacturing or related jobs in the past five years.

Kander also cited other statistics from American Automotive Policy Council — a jab at Blunt, whose son, former Gov. Matt Blunt, serves as president and the top lobbyist for the auto group.

Blunt made clear he has no plans to run from the tricky trade issue. Opening up new trade with Pacific markets will boost Missouri exports of corn, soybeans, rice, livestock and other products, he said, and mean more construction jobs as demand for ports and processing plants increase.