Nibbles: PPB, AnGR, Children of the corn, African wildlife & China, Japanese plastic food, Hedge balls, Falanghina et al., NY hipster kava bar, Genetics & diet

The next step in the evolution of participatory plant breeding is evolutionary plant breeding.
1458 livestock breeds are in trouble.
A blast from corn’s past. In more ways than one, as this article from High Country News is kinda old.
The Chinese market in African wildlife is bad for both.
Let them eat plastic.
Maclura pomifera is apparently all the rage in Iowa.
There’s more to Italian wine than chianti.
“You can’t really get fucked up on kava.” I beg to differ.
Two independent pieces on the continuing evolution of humans to cope with their diet: starch, milk and meat.

One Reply to “Nibbles: PPB, AnGR, Children of the corn, African wildlife & China, Japanese plastic food, Hedge balls, Falanghina et al., NY hipster kava bar, Genetics & diet”

Dave Wood says:

March 6, 2016 at 7:58 pm

“evolutionary plant breeding”
This article is full of praise of specific local adaptation. But farmers do not in general use such varieties. There are various clues on-farm that specific adaptation is of little use. For example, most food is grown from crops introduced from other continents; most farmers source seed away from their growing conditions – higher, wetter, drier or whatever (we have this in Scotland with potato seed for all across Europe); most farmers regularly change their varieties for others sourced from elsewhere. I think that, most of all, specific local adaptation may be to local constraining pests and diseases, inevitably giving local lower yields. Agroecologists are looking at only part of the spectrum of biological constraints faced by farmers. More of that agrobiodiversity may be a very bad thing if some bits are evolving faster than the crops.

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