• Higher maize yields? Plant cover crops between the rows.
• Barley tempeh! My kind of food exploration.
• Danny Hunter impresses Irish Times with need to conserve biodiversity.
• UK devotes millions to research for “bigger yields of better quality fruits and vegetables”.
• Germans embrace high-tech urban agriculture — cautiously.
• Put farmers’ markets near medical centres for added benefits. What happens when everyone’s so healthy they don’t need the doctor?

• Banana boffins at each others’ throats over alleged new species. Great spectator sport.
• What does a Musa voucher specimen look like, I wonder.
• Fancy shmanzy Bangkok restaurant links up with heirloom seedbank.
• Aroid network working really hard.
• Marker-assisted selection: a biotechnology we can all get behind. Can’t we?
• Conservation in Sierra Leone. No agrobiodiversity, natch.

• Mike Jackson gets himself a pulpit. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mike!
• More on the Filipino ex-genebank.
• What they grew in an ancient Israelite garden. Can they really tell Citrus species apart from their pollen?
• More American maps to mashup with obesity and food insecurity: land use, renewable energy sources…. I do hope someone is keeping track. Even of the more esoteric stuff, of course, like the names of softdrinks.
• Yet more on horse domestication.
• Another organic farming externality for your consideration. Thanks, Robert.
• ILRI gets innovative on this whole training thing.
• “The future of chocolate” revealed.
• Boffins look at fossil bison epigenetics to investigate adaptation to climate change. What will they think of next. Well, applying it to chickens, for a start.
• Other boffins move potato anti-nematode genes into bananas. No word on the epigenetics of it all.
• Indian report on how to strengthen role of agriculture in nutrition.
• Kew has money for fieldwork.
• Cleaning messy taxonomic data. Useful in Genebank Database Hell?

• Mulberries, on the Mast Tree Network
• Cucumber powder. If only I had a dehydrator.

• What wild foods did Neolithic farmers eat? Archaeobotanists want to know. So do we.
• British Foreign Office promotes economics of biodiversity and ecosystems in SE Asia. Nothing to say on agrobiodiversity.
• Maybe they could learn how to use Nature to profit from the San in Namibia?
• You say mango, I say bango, lets call the whole thing off.
• Is this now the biggest urban farm in the world?
• Silly veg stuff on Twitter. My favorite so far is Okra Winfrey.
• Seedy Sunday, approaching fast in the UK, cries out for some silliness.

• Want to teach about agrobiodiversity? Help is at hand.
• Want to learn about agrobiodiversity? Stay here.
• Want to know what’s going on in biodiversity conservation at Cambridge? Here’s how. Tell us if agriculture gets a look-in. If it doesn’t, come back here. But I bet there’ll be something about landscapes.
• What is a landscape? “The answer … differs tremendously depending on the respondent,” it says here. Wow, those Cambridge boffins will be so shocked.
• Want to know about the plants in that landscape whose definition is so much in the hands of respondents? Most were discovered by just a few botanical superstars. But how many women?
• And if that landscape is Turkish and there are (is?) livestock in it, this is what you’ll see.
• Want to tour the world’s top evolution sites? Here’s the first stop. Now, how about crop evolution (and domestication, natch) sites. Like some livestock- and crop-wild-relative-discovered-by-a-botanical-superstar-filled Turkish landscape, perhaps.
• Or what about sites connected with food production and marketing more generally, for that matter. No, that list would be too long. Interesting, but too long. Would need to prioritize ruthlessly.
• One thing for certain, though, it should include a couple of community genebanks.
• Where it is not inconceivable that seeds would be protected following age-old practices. Which may or may not be taught in fancy courses.
• Oh, and beer.

Great video from the Breadfruit Institute on the importance of that fruit in Hawaii.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Prof Roger Leakey, sometime of ICRAF (among other places), where he pioneered tree domestication in support of rural livelihoods, and now Vice Chairman of the International Tree Foundation, has a fascinating new book in the offing.

In contrast to the doom and gloom often emanating from the tropics, ‘Living with the Trees of Life’ illustrates how many different aspects of agricultural science can be combined into a more robust approach to farming, which will be productive, as well as more environmentally and socially sustainable. This approach uses agroforestry as a delivery mechanism for multifunctional agriculture aimed at addressing the cycle of land degradation and social deprivation in the tropics. A key role in this is played by the ‘Trees of Life’, the large number of indigenous trees that produce marketable fruits, nuts, medicines and other products of day-to-day importance in the lives of local people throughout the tropics.

The book promises to be very practical.

A 3-step approach is described which can be used to close the Yield Gap (the difference between the yield potential of food crops and the yields actually achieved by farmers). This pays special attention to land husbandry and to the wise use of the natural resources which support agriculture and the livelihoods of poor farmers. By closing the Yield Gap agroforestry builds on the advances of the Green Revolution.

Builds on those advances while avoiding its pitfalls, and indeed rectifying its more regrettable consequences, one assumes.

Finally, all this comes together in a set of five ‘Convenient Truths’ which highlight that we have most of the knowledge and skills we need. This is illustrated by the Equator Prize winning project ‘Food for Progress’, in Cameroon, a project which has also been recognized by UK Government’s Office for Science as an African Success Story.

I had a little trouble identifying this project, but I believe I finally found it, and very interesting it sounds too.

Look out for the book in July, from CABI.

• Big new project on farm animal genomics. Gene-jockeys lick lips.
• Big new push to raise money for the Moringa Fund. Agroforesters lick lips.
• Big new hardiness zone map unleashed by USDA on unsuspecting world. American GIS people and gardeners lick lips.
• Bill Gates mentions cassava. CIAT licks lips.

• Dogs were first domesticated animal. But the love affair is cooling off, at least for some breeds.
• Building capacity for animal genetic resources use, and for conservation and sustainable use under the ITPGRFA. And tree domestication. Is someone keeping track?
• BGI continues to take over DNA world.
• And the Worst Plant Virus Oscar goes to…
• How PNG farmers cope with drought. From what is developing into a really useful blog.
• I wish I had time to read 200 pages on ancient Athenian food. But maybe you do?
• Learn about the USDA potato collection, including lots of wild relatives.
• The tree that thinks it’s a supermarket: Moringa in the limelight again.