- Totally forgot if we already linked to this latest pean to open source seed.
- Climate-smart agriculture described in three paragraphs.
- Hope someone explains it to European farmers, and soon.
- Italy is increasingly wooded. But only because farms are being abandoned. Maybe not climate-smart enough?
- If only those farms had better links to markets, like in E. Africa…
- Dutch food writer on the Jewish (maybe) origins of the Surinamese national dish. Gotta love edible aroids. Jeremy does his podcast thing.
- Step 1: Breed your hops.
- Step 2: Find a funky yeast.
- Step 3: Crack the Kenyan beer market.
- Back to real life: USAID’s brand new multisectoral nutrition policy. Now, then, what’s the betting that the agricultural interventions supported by USAID avoided the risks that such things often hold for nutrition (incomes, prices, types of products, women social status and workload, sanitary environment and inequalities)?
- SeedMap.org breaks down crop wild relatives.
- Somebody mention crop wild relatives? Yes, Sandy Knapp.
- Somebody mention parientes silvestres de cultivos? Yes, Nora Castañeda.
- How many CWR will go the way of Arabidopsis? Because southern populations of that species in genebanks are already doing better than local populations in northern sites.
- How many crop wild relatives in Kew’s meadows?
`Climate-smart agriculture’ – silly naming. It doesn’t do what it says on the packet. I think they mean `agriculture for climate change’. We have had climate-smart agriculture for thousands of years – since people started moving crops away from their regions of origin to everywhere else with similar climates: wine grapes to Chile and California; wheat to Australia, vanilla to Polynesia, oil palm to Indonesia, the entire Columbian exchange. Imperial botanists of many countries knew exactly what they were doing and there is no reason we cannot keep doing it under most climate change scenarios.
It is more likely that these `trees in fields’ people are more interested in animal conservation than feeding people and are getting funding from the vast conservation agencies who see most food production in developing countries as a threat to their conservation objectives (and, at least in some cases, their national exports).