• The Tatar Information Agency announces a conference to celebrate NI Vavilov’s 125th birthday, neglects to include date: 25 November 2012?
• Rice and ritual expresses the “intangible cultural heritage of agriculture and food”.
• Canadian scores four new old tomatoes from their genebank.
• The agave fight goes on.

• 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?

• Yale University magazine drinks the fast-track breeding KoolAid panacea.
• Compare and contrast. Repeat. Endlessly.
• Grafting tomatoes is hot for lots of reasons; but how does it protect against leaf-borne diseases? And not just tomatoes, actually.
• Getting the lowdown on that “food sovereignty” farrago.
• And today’s DNA sequencing will solve world hunger and cure bunions story.
• Genomics also good for “health, agriculture, livestock, fisheries and biodiversity” in Philippines. Have we forgotten anything?
• Well yeah, you forgot your handy molecular toolkit.
• Meanwhile, back in the real world, the choice is between forests and yaks.
• More hard choices: evotourism destinations. But check it out, there be agricultural biodiversity too!
• And another one: to go to the International Sandalwood Symposium, or not to go?

• The annual Wageningen agrobiodiversity conservation course is in India this year. Hannes says it’s really good.
• AVRDC’s veggie seed kits are a hit in Orissa.
• CIMMYT swimming in data. Waving, not drowning.
• IRRI not doing badly either. But “quantitative train loci” is a new one on me.
• Australia thinking about introducing elephants. Yeah because that sort of thing has been such a success in the past.
• Well, actually, with sheep, I suppose it has, in a way. And the genetics says breeders have a lot of diversity to play with still.
• Your mama is a llama.
• The Island of Dogs has crop wild relatives. No, not the one in London.
• Cuba goes for new urban crops. And not for the first time, Shirley. But what about the old ones?
• Quick, duck! This piece has been rather a hit for me over on Facebook.
• VII International Symposium on Artichoke, Cardoon and Their Wild Relatives: The (Very Expensive) Book.
• Food sovereignty “started in New England”. Huh? And proponents “want to eat and sell the food they grow free from interference from state and federal regulators”. Huh?

• Revitalising socio-ecological production landscapes. It’s all the buzz, even though it doesn’t trip off my tongue.
• And the buzz keeps building for AgBioDiv 2012 in Ireland, 9 February.
• The great house of Veitch — but not a word about their many veg varieties.
• The first “really” purple tomato now available as seed.

• More evidence of India’s fascination with little-known indigenous
  cattle breeds.
• Forbes reviews Borlaug bio.
• FAO Forestry has a nifty new mobile app. No idea why.
• VI International Symposium on Brassicas and XVIII Crucifer Genetics Workshop looking for sponsors. Any ideas?
• Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison is today’s “Face of Plant Cell Biology“.
• Of course it is a daft idea to claim rights over the word “agave”. But will anyone listen?
• Blimey! A penguin is like a lime juice.

• Unlike spring, we’re late to The Guardian’s citizen science map of “weird nature”. Please Sir, can we have one for agriculture?
• Apples in French Indochina; more histoire des pommes française, or something.
• Scaling up food supplies — in ancient Egypt.
• “Conserving biodiversity could benefit the world’s poor,” it says here.
• South Asian boffins launch regional vegetable research network. Only 5 crops, but open-pollinated varieties will be included in the trials.
• “Ending malnutrition is a matter of political will. If India wanted to address childhood malnutrition in any serious way, it could.” Marion Nestle lays it on the line.
• Diversity in drylands linked to greater resilience. A press release, and a news report.

Ever google “onions” to get information on what varieties to plant or the crop’s nutritional composition or how to grow it and get bombarded with nothing but recipes for the first n pages? No, neither have I, but one of the things I learned at yesterday’s GlobalHort meeting on DOCNet here in Rome is that they have a nifty function on their website which limits searching to a number of technical websites, thus minimizing this problem. What it doesn’t do, alas, is return the results from searches of different online species databases, as we’ve seen in these case of the taxonomic information aggregator we discussed recently. I also learned that the GlobalHort website, for all its searching sophistication, lacks an RSS feed.

• Informal “Seed” Systems and the Management of Gene Flow in Traditional Agroecosystems: The Case of Cassava in Cauca, Colombia. Farmers move cassava around a lot.
• Ecological and socio-cultural factors influencing in situ conservation of crop diversity by traditional Andean households in Peru. Farmers should be supported in moving tubers around more.
• Nutritional and morphological diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): Identification of elite cultivars for food security. There’s a lot of it.
• Man the Fat Hunter: The Demise of Homo erectus and the Emergence of a New Hominin Lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant. Disappearance of elephant led to replacement of Homo erectus. Quite a difference from the more recent hominin-elephant dynamic.
• Fitness consequences of plants growing with siblings: reconciling kin selection, niche partitioning and competitive ability. All agriculture is about reconciling kin selection.
• Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Revisionism rules.
• Tracing genetic differentiation of Chinese Mongolian sheep using microsatellites. Five populations clustered by fancy science into, ahem, five populations.
• Road connectivity, population, and crop production in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fancy science reveals better roads would be good for agriculture. Hell, my mother-in-law could have told them that.
• Econutrition: Preventing Malnutrition with Agrodiversity Interventions. Home gardening is the way to go.
• Carotenoid and retinol composition of South Asian foods commonly consumed in the UK. Palak paneer is not just good, it’s good for you.

• The value of conserving coffee diversity? Actually more like the cost, but anyway.
• CIP publishes a hardcopy variety catalogue. How quaint.
• The latest installment of the Consortium’s pean to the CG at 40 is all about chickpeas.
• Indian farmer to set up “collective seed bank for climate emergencies and future generations.” No word on whether he’s using Climate Analogues.
• I All African Horticultural Congress proceedings online.
• The case for and against livestock handouts.
• Mexican men do not grind.
• World Livestock 2011 out online as bunch of PDFs. How quaint.
• Pakistanis told to turn to agroforestry before it’s too late.
• Head of CGIAR says we need agricultural research to feed the world. Well he would, wouldn’t he.
• There’s money in them thar mints.