- Possibly interesting article on Nagoya ABS Protocol, but I’ll never know.
- Pomegranate juice fraud?
- Fort Collins genebank in the (local) news.
- Sudan to become self-sufficient in wheat. Sorghum also involved.
- James of the Giant Corn gives idiot pontificator a well-deserved drubbing.
- Brachiaria forage not a “magic bullet” shock.
- Chile moans about lack of benefit sharing, but fails to do anything about it.
- DG of Bioversity beats agricultural biodiversity for nutrition and health drum shock.
- Carol Deppe has a web site. (she’s the Backyard Vegetable Breeder person.)
Nibbles: Milk deaths, Peas, Botany, Mixed cropping
- The perils of industrial agriculture‘s race to the bottom.
- Heirloom veg nuts play with gene jockeys and everybody wins.
- The roadside botanist, bananas and cassava biodiversity.
- Biodiversity can support a greener revolution in Africa; fine paper. Ignore the press release; it’s rubbish.
Breeding for resilience
Breeding for resilience: a strategy for organic and low-input farming systems? — a conference organized by EUCARPIA that we mentioned a while back — kicks off next week, and the programme looks pretty interesting. I don’t see any obvious ways in which the organizers plan to share the contents more widely, at least until the obligatory proceedings are published, and I hear that there’s no space left.
I wonder what it would cost to hire a couple of top-notch bloggers to cover conferences like these. 1
Featured: Farmers with phones
Natalia, who runs a mobile phone service, could plug a gap:
We have a database of farmers all across Kenya – we know they location, what they grow and size of the farm. At the moment we have a database of 30.000 farmers, but plan to expand up to 100 k in the next few months. We are searching for the way to commercialise this data source.
And there’s the rub. Advertisers may wish to pay for that list, but would the farmers really benefit? Alas, for the purposes of building a public good, like a better distribution map, no-one is likely to stump up. But Natalia, just think of the goodwill your company could derive if you shared the data, suitably anonymized!
Nibbles: Gourd, Climate, Khasi, Diet, Mauka, Diseases
- Unusual uses for a gourd.
- CIAT says North Africa will suffer most from climate change. So it must be true.
- Food Festival in the Khasi-Jaintia Hills of Mawphlang in India.
- Forget the global poor and their hidden hunger. We’re not eating our fruit and veg either.
- Evangelinemay1 wants to know how to “bring back biodiversity to our agricultural crops“. Let’s all love-bomb her, shall we?
- Radix has mauka seeds! (He means anthocarps of Mirabilis expansa.)
- ILRI continues to decrease agrobiodiversity — of animal diseases.