Mpho Mathabathe-Mala

🗣️ A polymath focusing on 🌍 Food & natural systems: 👩🏽‍🌾 🇭🇺 | In service:

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

📍Poland.

My love for growing food doesn’t stop at our farm. On the way back from Poland, reflecting on our work with @EFSA_EU on Polish agricultural landscapes - so much to learn from how culture, science, and farming intersect.

https://t.co/VgmLIlFh01

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

2063 is a very long time from now - 50-year master plan Leader?

Africa dance, I want to celebrate with Mama, call Papa.🖤🌍 🌱
https://t.co/F8a6ZXG91b

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

@itsme_urstruly We are sitting on gold, looking at the gutter like it's a shooting star. 😆

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

@AP Great mindsets, because embodied carbon needs to be significantly reduced.

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

@theobromic_ "A plea for reformed spelling" is taking me out.

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

The Maths is Mathing.
https://t.co/k02gLUM72P

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

@DonGiardino This is power. 🙏🏾

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

In Ethiopia, you can fly over miles of farms and grazing land, then suddenly see a perfect green circle. That patch of trees is a church and a 1,500-year-old conservation system.

For centuries, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has taught that a church should be surrounded by forest. The building isn't complete without trees around it. In many places, the priests are the forest's last line of defense.

And it worked. Across Ethiopia, tens of thousands of these church forests still survive: small islands of native forest wrapped around churches, monasteries, cemeteries, and sacred ground.

Much of Ethiopia's historic forest, especially in the northern highlands, has been cleared for farms, grazing, fuelwood, and settlement. In some places, the church forest is the only old native forest left for miles.

Step outside the trees and you are in hot, dry, exposed farmland. Step inside and the temperature drops. Birds call. Insects move through the understory. Native plants, pollinators, fungi, and seedlings survive in a place they vanished from everywhere else.

Forest ecologist Alemayehu Wassie has spent years studying them. He once described the feeling of entering a church forest from the surrounding farmland as going 'from hell to heaven.'

Some of them are tiny, some are huge. Some are damaged and many are under pressure from livestock, farming, paths, and edge effects.

But they are still there because people believed a holy place shouldn't stand alone in the dirt. It should be surrounded by life.

Imagine if every church, temple, mosque, school, library, and town hall believed the same thing.

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

@OptimoPrincipi Is this why right/ownership to ancestral land is so important? ownership is lack of a better word. 😭

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

Your work is a great contribution Isaac! This is a very interesting read. Thank you for sharing. 🙏🏽

[isaac Samuel @rhaplord]

In colonial Senegal, French agronomists, who despised African agricultural methods, ran a series of experiments from 1897 to 1899 to prove the superiority of plows over hoes, only to confirm the effectiveness of the latter.
https://t.co/qQXaLAl9QW

[isaac Samuel @rhaplord]

Agricultural yields in 19th-century Ethiopia
https://t.co/qQXaLAl9QW

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

Country duties. Forever Patriot! 🇿🇦

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

📍European Parliament, Budapest.
https://t.co/B1EgEC93JY

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

@EmasonRyan 💯

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

Great on the electronics side, but weak on the agriculture.

Most orchards have a strategy to prevent weeds: companion planting, mulching or simply working with the soil beforehand. This an unnatural way to solve the problem and very expensive too.

It bypasses conservation. 🫤

[Cornell University @Cornell]

A team of undergraduates from @CornellCALS and @CornellEng beat out 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their invention: an autonomous robot that kills weeds with electricity.

Their robot can travel through a vineyard or orchard without a human operator, zapping weeds with a small amount of electricity, saving labor and energy, and preventing crop loss, without the use of herbicides.

Read more: https://t.co/ggGejuzqo6

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

@longnow Yes, my brother!!!

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

@OfficialSethu As it should, this is going to be so good. Brilliant Sethu! 🫰🏽

[Kilo @KiloxKaneki]

Sunday Test Kitchen: (pt. 1)

Peach Mousse🥰

Notes:
…there are none 😭

5/5
I’ll check back in later to explain why I made this

[History ZAR @HistorySAZAR]

Farm workers hold up bunches of grapes recently picked from vines at a vineyard at Paarl near Cape Town, South Africa in April 1946. Credit: James Jarche/Popperfoto

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

What a privilege, Somandla! 👩🏾‍🌾🙏🏾

[Aseel Swaid @aseelswaid9]

Nigeria (1974)

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

...https://t.co/jLFsdJI3Mn

[Mpho Mathabathe-Mala @mphomala]

Intercontinental. 🌱🌍
https://t.co/gre2ATI6UZ