Nibbles: New Agriculturist, Coffee
- New Agriculturist is out. Among many cool things, check out the piece on crossing rice with a wild relative to make it perennial.
- Nestle finds 33 elite coffee trees in Indonesia, evaluates 6, will use these to produce seedlings by somatic embryogenesis. What could possibly go wrong?
Livestock genetics symposium online
DAD-Net informs us that the presentations given at the symposium on Statistical Genetics of Livestock for the Post-Genomic Era, held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, on May 4-6, 2009, are now available online in the form of both PDFs and videos. Quite a resource.
Featured: FIGS
Jacob has an idea why using climate data won’t always make the haystack smaller:
To me, the potato results mean that we shouldn’t be looking at selection, but at migration and drift. Selection reduces diversity, migration and drift determine where it goes.
Millet news from the front
I could spend all day reading the blogs of volunteers in different countries. One I keep coming back to is Jessica’s Letter from Niger. It’s an exciting time:
There is a rush to do as much planting as possible before the soil dries out, so families spend all day every day out in the fields, working hard to get all of their millet, sorghum, beans, sesame, and peanuts in the ground. Millet is the priority; once an entire field is planted in millet, people will go back and plant the other crops in the spaces between.
I hope their crops survive and do well.