Nibbles: Illicit ag, Illicit stats, Irish folk meds, Medieval farming, Zoo methods, Date collection, Apple breeding, Ancient cannabis, Old yeast

Sorry about slow blogging lately. Life caught up with us. Slowly getting back in the saddle…
ISIS benefitting from agricultural production as much as oil.
Why we should drop “statistically significant.”
Irish folk medicine being used. Again. Or still.
Back to the future of farms, medieval edition: it’s the faldage, stupid.
Botanical art in history.
Applying zoo methods to plant conservation. Maybe should be the other way too?
The future of dates is in the US?
History of the Honeycrisp apple, for all you Red Delicious haters out there.
Ancient stash found. Down to seeds and stems.
Keep warm with some nice Latin American drinks.
Or beer made from old yeast from a shipwreck.

A paean to diverse diets is just what we all need.
And another one, from the MIT Technology Review of all places.
Menawhile, there’s only one reference to dietary diversity in the World Bank’s investment framework for nutrition.
Maybe you have to quantify that diversity before you can save it? Now where have I heard that before?
Meanwhile, Europe reports on biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Does that include the biodiversity of the actual crops? Perhaps surprisingly, yes!
You want biodiversity-friendly farming practices? Talk to Indigenous people. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has launched an e-consultation on “Preserving, strengthening and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ food and knowledge systems and traditional practices for sustainable food systems.”
There’s diversity in asparagus too.
Genebanks can help with those biodiversity-friendly practices, diverse diets and rops and Indigenous practices.
Even big international genebanks.
Even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But some are in trouble.
Though others are coming back.