Jeremy Cherfas

January 7, 2014

Nibbles: Cranberry, Apple, Quail

Obviously it is going to take a while to get back up to cruisin’ speed, so we’ll start slow before we accelerate back to the future and attempt to catch up.

Ready to amuse at the next Thanksgiving, a history of the cranberry.
Ready for the next apple you eat (or, in my case, run from), a history of Granny Smith.
Ready for bankruptcy? A recent history of quail farming in Kenya.

January 7, 2014

While we were gone …

… there was a long discussion of some important minutiae concerning the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, all occasioned by a little footnote in a learned paper. The footnote sought to “point out the tensions involved” in “motivations for distributing multilateral system PGRFA to non-ITPGRFA members”.

Lovers of alphabet soup will find much there to feast on, as will historians of the Treaty and its antecedents. Thanks to all who contributed. A nagging counterfactual remains: would there have been that much discussion had the footnote been incorporated in the body of the paper? I guess we’ll never know.

December 22, 2013January 7, 2014

We’re outta here

pere-noel-vert

Story goes that Santa used to be green, and that he was recoloured by that soft-drink company. Too true to be good?

We’re recharging our solar-powered batteries for a couple of weeks, back around 6 January 2014. And, however and wherever you are, whatever you are doing, we wish you well. ¹

December 20, 2013

Nibbles: Wild veg, Cleome, Barberries, Alley-cropped wheat, Bison, Seed potatoes, Veg database, IPR of PGRFA

Wild veg are very much in the news today. Teresa Borelli and Danny Hunter are unlocking their potential.
Meanwhile, Eileen Omosa actually has unlocked their potential. Here’s her take on Cleome gynandra (smoked out by Luigi’s photo of same).
And then there are barberries, scourge of rust-susceptible wheat.
Some trees, though, properly deployed, can be good for wheat. My head’s spinning with all that complexity.
Saddest story you’ll read all day? Or most hopeful? A timeline of the status of the bison in North America.
Seed degeneration to be studied. And about time too. Course, they don’t mean true seed. That never degenerates, not even in the
World Vegetable Center’s spiffy genebank, whose database contains 438 species. As odd a way to advertise the database as any.
And here’s a thought to strike terror into the hearts of genebank curators everywhere: plant genetic resources may not all be public goods after all, says noted expert Michael Halewood.

December 19, 2013

Nibbles: Ecosystem services, EU hearing, Competition, Stagnant yields, Abandoned croplands, Ferments

We’re almost out of here, until 6 January 2014. Till then …

Possibly the best current explanation of why ecosystem services are worth paying for. Stay with it.
Would you like to see Roberto Papa tell the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee what he thinks of the proposals on plant reproductive material? Thought so.
Young agricultural blogger? CTA wants to hear from you for the YoBloCo awards.
Nature’s on a roll lately: Crop yields are growing arithmetically, and you can stuff that in your anti-Malthusian stocking.
What, then, to do with Eastern Europe’s abandoned croplands?
Maybe we could ferment them.