Nibbles: Information, Domestication, Cats, Conference, Gunpowder gardening, Policy advice, Potatoes, Ancient vineyards, New UG99, Bovine emissions, Cacao ants, Palaeo-diet, Bloody quinoa, Tokyo’s honey, Urban biodiversity, Ilex, Conifers

Wow! Just wow. Big Picture Agriculture has launched an incredibly useful website.
Chromosomes, crops and superdomestication, a slideshare presentation by Pat Heslop-Harrison.
Cats, domesticated? Not as far as I’m concerned. Still, Ancient Chinese cats ate rats, leading to their domestication.
Independent plant breeders, a conference just for you.
Great ammunition for the lazy gardener.
IBPES told to “tap the wisdom of indigenous peoples”.
Kenyan policymakers told to consider the potato.
Basque vineyards of a millennium ago.
A new strain of UG99 wheat rust? But this time, the world is ready.
Variable diets linked to variable emissions shock.
scidev.net reports that ants protect cacao trees from fungal diseases. (Yes, I’m taking short cuts here.)
Palaeolithic people preferred nutrition-rich places.
And quinoa remains as confusing as ever.
Tokyo’s local honey.
Although agriculture barely features in a paean to urban biodiversity. It should.
The holly and the coffee: The Botanist in the Kitchen does Yerba Maté
Ready for the inevitable ennui of next Christmas, a taxonomy of conifers.

2 Replies to “Nibbles: Information, Domestication, Cats, Conference, Gunpowder gardening, Policy advice, Potatoes, Ancient vineyards, New UG99, Bovine emissions, Cacao ants, Palaeo-diet, Bloody quinoa, Tokyo’s honey, Urban biodiversity, Ilex, Conifers”

Cédric Jeanneret says:

January 9, 2014 at 10:07 am

Belated best wishes for the new year to the agrobiodiverse community. I am looking forward to reading your posts and comments.

I wanted to share this: the University of Adelaide and its ‘Database of Regional, National and Global Winegrape Bearing Areas by Variety, 2000 and 2010’ at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/wine-econ/databases/winegrapes/

RE Wow: Great initiative. Kay McDonald is really proactive and smart in sharing the best ag information. The new website is a work in progress: maybe in the future a search function, keyword logic, RSS and better overage of issues in the Third World (that is probably not the purpose/interest of BigPicAg though)? Ads are legit in this case, but then asking for help is less so, imho. Anyway, this is a great example of a no-nonsense, timely and useful online information aggregator.

Reply
1. Luigi Guarino says:
  
  January 9, 2014 at 11:08 am
  
  We just beat you to that winegrapes thing (see today’s Nibbles). But thank you for thinking of us, and happy new year to you too.
  
  Reply