Nibbles: Sunflowers, Gardens, Cassava, Gates, History

by Jeremy Cherfas on February 27, 2012

Everything you need to know about sunflowers, as it happens. They’re not cassava.
New York Botanical Gardens has a climate change garden. Coupla apples mentioned, no other food, not even cassava.
Cassava, “the Rambo of food crops,” will save the world. Did Rambo use silver bullets?
The Center for Global Development thinks Bill Gates is the cassava of agriculture. No, wait …
JStor Plant Biology rounds up his favourite historical food papers. Cassava absent

Fresh Nibbles: May 18, 2012 : <- click to comment

Ancient olives not that old after all. But still attractive.
Giving up tobacco – in favor of purple sweet potatoes?
Kew is now as much about cooking as growing. Visit the 18th century kitchens.
Linking small farmers to markets, video from a conference.
The International Treaty’s SMTA made easy. Well, kinda. It would have been even easier if they had linked to the site. Good thing there’s us, eh?

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Mark Nesbitt knows who the Director of Agriculture is Tanzania was in 1934:

The sorghum collection – all 956 accessions – was acquired by J.D. Snowden while working on his 1936 book (still in print!) “Cultivated Races of Sorghum”. It’s a perfect example of a collection that 20 years ago would have seemed useless (old seeds, mostly dead) but thanks to new techniques (DNA analysis) suddenly looks very interesting as a record of landrace distribution before the Green Revolution.

So, any gene jockeys out there interested in extracting DNA from old seeds? Just for information, there are 1058 sorghum accessions from Tanzania in Genesys. How much can it cost to run a bunch of microsatellites on 2,000 samples?

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Nibbles: Sunflowers, Gardens, Cassava, Gates, History

Fresh Nibbles: May 18, 2012 : <- click to comment

Nibbles Archive: All that condensed goodness.

And easy access to the Brainfood Archive.

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