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January 27, 2010January 23, 2015

Nibbles: GIPB, NPGS, Dogs for conservation, Harare gardens, Goat milk value added, Equator Prize, Humanitarian relief, Peruvian maize, Pseudo-cereals, Katine, Vavilov goes web 2.0, Travel, Haggis ban, African road datasets, Dyes, Adaptation pix, Baltic, AnGR, Jatropha

GIPB revamps its website. Knowledge Resource Centre is ver. 4.0, no less. US National Plant Germplasm System explained to Canadians. Why? They have their own! Armadillo sniffing dogs. More urban farming in Zimbabwe. Interesting stuff you can make with goat milk. Who do you like for Equator Prize 2010? Avatar? No, wait, that’s something else. …

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November 19, 2011November 17, 2011

Is modern plant breeding bad for your health?

Gary Taubes has been making a pretty decent living of late pushing the line that sugar is a poison. His argument was recently summarized in The American Conservative, which should perhaps give pause for thought, but let that slide: …to science journalist Gary Taubes the idea that successful weight loss depends on eating less and …

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September 28, 2011September 27, 2011

Bringing together researchers and breeders

It all started with a bravura Annals of Botany blog post from Pat Heslop Harrison from a scientific conference in Assisi: “Italian Genetics Societies in Assisi: staple foods and orphan crops via epigenomics and systems biology.” That got posted to Facebook, where I commented on it by extracting what I found a particularly trenchant sentence: …

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June 30, 2011June 30, 2011

Tasteful crop breeding

What [breeders] say to me over and over again is no one’s ever asked me about flavor. No one asks me about flavor. They always ask me about yield and disease resistance… All we have to do is select for flavor. That’s from an interview with Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, …

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June 7, 2011

A more strategic approach to evaluation?

I feel we need evaluation data on ‘agronomic’ performance. Morphological description, in most cases, totally pointless. That was the first response to my posting of the rice sheath blight story on GIPB the other day. Somewhat provoked, one of the authors of the paper prepared this reposte. Consider this like a “morphological FIGS” (Focused Identification …

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