- Professor said meat should be properly priced to avoid disaster. Why just meat?
- “The Seed Makers Who Don’t Pray for Rain.” Slick, but do they actually pray for drought?
- Found the above here, but is GMO drought resistance really “very important stuff to making farming sustainable”?
- Kenyan farmers grow mushrooms. Fun, guys.
- Does Africa need better product branding?
- Public Aid, Philanthropy, and the Privatization of African Agricultural Development. I confess, I didn’t understand most of it.
- Rhizowen invents the artichon. Who says there’s no new food to be discovered?
- Kew celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Pollinators get a look-in.
- Rome celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Agriculture prominent.
- IUCN celebrates Allium pskemense: edible, medicinal, a crop wild relative, and threatened.
- World record plate of hummus, 10,452 kg of tasty serotonin.
- Local man sends USDA a fig they didn’t have in their genebank.
Featured: Livestock
Susan MacMillan adds more arrows to the quiver of dietary diversification:
Let’s not forget another important if traditional weapon in our arsenal — animal agriculture, which provides poor households with modest quantities of milk and meat, which help human bodies make better use of the staples they consume, as well as help farmers not only make regular incomes but also make more efficient, sustainable and productive use of their croplands and farming systems. Indeed, the oldest staple of all may be not grains but diversification itself.
Comments on Nibbles
Regular commenter Dirk Enneking suggests we rethink Nibbles:
Some sort of interaction with specific nibbles through a comment function could help your readers to turn your nibblings into a more interesting dia- or poly/multi-logue i.e. you’d get some reaction.
It’s an interesting idea. You can, of course, comment on any day’s worth of Nibbles, although I admit is isn’t obvious how. You have to go to the Nibbles Archive, by clicking on the link for All that condensed goodness in the sidebar on the right. Then you click on the Nibbles’ headline, and that brings up the complete entry with a comment form below. Cumbersome, I know, which is why we don’t get many comments on Nibbles and why Dirk’s idea is worth thinking about.
The thing is, Nibbles have been through many incarnations. To begin with, each Nibble was a separate post, which made them easy enough to comment on, but they got in the way of the main flow of longer posts. Then we moved them off into the sidebar, still as individual posts, but on a busy day older ones could easily disappear. Now we have a single post for Nibbles each day, but we still have it boxed off and separate. We could restore Nibbles to the main flow, and ensure that that post stays at the top of the content each day. Or we could rethink completely and go back to individual entries, one per Nibble.
I’m working on adding a Comment link directly to the boxed-off Nibbles, but in the meantime it would be interesting to know what you think. I’ve always thought that the place to comment on Nibbles it at the item they link to, but maybe that’s misguided. Lots of Nibbles end up on Twitter; maybe that’s the place for the conversation? Let us know, using the exceedingly simply Comment link below.
Clean water and indigenous knowledge
SciDev.net reports that prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp) can be used in a simple process to remove 98% of bacteria from dirty water. 1 That would be good news for poor people who may be surrounded by prickly pears, but lack clean water. Alas, (some) poor people don’t want pure water.
“Stomach and intestinal infections are considered a way of cleansing the body, and are not conceived as diseases.”
Oh the dilemma. Preserve their indigenous knowledge, or offer them better health? 2
Strangely, among other communities, on another continent, indigenous knowledge of the water purifying properties of Moringa seeds is just plain confused. Some people know all about it, others believe that more than three Moringa trees are “a source of misfortune that brings poverty and death”. But not from water-borne diseases, perhaps.
Nibbles: Conservation, Women, Subsidies, Bees, Microbes, Rhizobia, Genebanks, Chicken history, Nordic genebank
- Academics say conservation of biodiversity does not benefit the poor. Maybe they’re talking about the wrong kind of biodiversity?
- Innovation of the Week: Feeding Communities by Focusing on Women. I think my irony detector may be on the fritz.
- All you ever wanted to know about farm subsidies in the US. h/t Food Politics.
- The Bittersweet Dreams of Uruguay’s Beekeepers. Sad.
- State microbes! Really fun, and informative. Any better ideas?
- More microbes: The evolution of nitrogen fixation. Absolutely fascinating.
- Slideshow on genebanks in southern Africa.
- Pre-Columbian, Polynesian chickens in Chile not Polynesian and probably not pre-Columbian. Blast! Why must fun theories always run up against the brick wall of facts?
- NordGen’s annual report: crops, forests, livestock.