- Nice video on the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew. Compare and contrast with Ft Collins. Or CIAT’s genebank for that matter.
- Quality video on quality management systems in genebanks. No doubt followed to the letter by the three above.
- Video of webinar by Roger Leakey explaining how trees will save us: “The Global Food Crisis: Can we Heal a Divided and Ailing World?”
- Collecting wild rice in Australia. No video, alas, but nice pics.
- App to identify plants for leaves. If ever a video was needed…
- The latest on the CGIAR re-re-structuring. Hollywood interested, I’m told.
- Meanwhile, El Niño beginning to affect PNG.
- Which doesn’t stop a watermelon going for thousands in Japan.
- Hope El Niño doesn’t affect Colombia’s plans to stuff it to poor Bolivian quinoa farmers.
- Enough plants already. Asian sheep more diverse than previously thought, thanks to both migration from Fertile Crescent and indigenous development and back-dispersal.
- Not to mention “Surprising ways Kenyans are embracing climate-smart agriculture“.
Wild rice in Australia: Good stuff.
The account says: “The trees open onto a brilliant, sunny clearing about a quarter-mile wide and composed of a single plant: erect green blades, topped by a yellow aura of grains. It looks like a farm field waiting to be harvested, but in fact it is roughly 10 acres of Robert’s nameless wild plants.”
Fifteen years ago I spent a day in the CSIRO Herbarium in Canberra looking at sheets of wild rice and sorghum. For rice I recorded something similar (`gregarious’ means lots together).
Any agroecologist like to explain why we need polycultures when wild relatives are found in pure stands?
Oryza australiensis Domin annual
Pullen 9302 Common, gregarious, NT shallow depresssion
Cranson and Greem 8551 `large populations’
O. longiglumis Ridl. Papua
Henty and Forman 49418 `gregarious’
O. meridionalis Ng,
Waterhouse and Borgman 9539 (with Nymphaea/Limnophila) `pure stand above water’
O. minuta Presl Indonesia
Vogel 3821 `gregarous herb’ on lake margin
The latest CG restructuring: Behind a paywall but IRRI Facebook goes a bit further:
“Such “endless reorganization” suggests “you are not identifying the main problems,” says Robert Zeigler, IRRI’s director-general, a CGIAR center. He thinks greater effort should go into securing stable funding and prioritizing research.
Zeigler, for one, worries that CGIAR’s latest overhaul will be an unwelcome distraction as it grapples with a harsh fundraising environment. “We’re burning up another year to 2 years in a reorganization,” he says, when the time and effort would be better spent shoring up CGIAR’s finances and making tough decisions about which programs deserve the precious support.”