How they make cheese

4 February 2012

This Sunday, an estimated 58 percent of Americans will order pizza for Super Bowl parties around the country. To celebrate Game Day classics like pizza, cheese dips and nachos, we went to Wisconsin — the American dairyland that produces 35 percent of the country’s cheese — to find out the chemistry behind cheesemaking. The “we” [...]

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Mapping America

3 February 2012

So there I was Scooping away, and what should turn up among the stuff I follow, and almost side by side on the screen to boot? Well, this map of obesity rates and farmer markets in the USA: And, I kid you not, this map of food insecurity in, you guessed it, the USA. Eyeballing [...]

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Another photograph of Erna Bennett surfaces

2 February 2012

Thanks to Helmut Knüpffer for sending in a scan of the Plant Introduction Newsletter No. 22 (July 1969), featuring a short report about the “FAO Panel of Experts on Plant Exploration and Introduction”. This includes a photograph of the eminent participants, one of whom is Erna Bennett (top left), who died a few weeks back.

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How to react to emergencies

2 February 2012

From early 2000, various agencies and individuals involved in livestock relief work began to question the quality and professionalism of their interventions. Wow, thanks for sharing. Anyway, out of that crisis of self-esteem was LEGS born, the Livestock Emergency Guidelines and Standards. It’s not immediately clear to me after a brief browse of the website [...]

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Crop wild relatives of the USA

2 February 2012

I’ve just come across the Jepson Flora Project, which brings together all of the floristic references and data of the Jepson Herbarium. Resources of the Flora Project are directly linked the the Consortium of California Herbaria, CalPhotos, the California Native Plant Society, California Exotic Pest Plant Council, USDA-Plants database, and many other external sites. The [...]

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A valuable round up on watchamacallits (NUS, orphan crops, development opportunity crops etc etc)

1 February 2012

On the Agricultures website our friends Stefano Padulosi and Paul Bordoni have just published a very valuable round-up on what they call “underutilized species”. 1 Valuable especially because it returns to the topic after six more years of research in the field, casting a historical eye over what worked and pointing out that these species [...]

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Survey on African orphan crops

1 February 2012

Danny posted the following recently on the “Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition” Yahoo Group. I couldn’t find it anywhere else online, so he may have got it by email, I’m not sure. He did ask for it to be more widely disseminated, so here goes. We have mentioned the African Orphan Crop consortium here before, [...]

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Maize breeder retires

1 February 2012

“Never have so many people who plant and consume maize, now and in the future, owed so much to a single person…We value what you have accomplished and future generations of humans will be more food secure because of your service.” Suketoshi Taba, breeder at CIMMYT, has retired. Awaiting the memoirs …

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Best of botany blogs at Berry go Round

31 January 2012

Berry go Round, the botany blog carnival, is up at Moss Plants & More. Jessica Budke has done a fine job of rounding up the best botany blogging on the web; pop over and take a look. Next month’s host is Bora Zivkovic at Blog Around the Clock. Maybe some of those posts about control [...]

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