- Over-exploitation threatens extinction for the Cliff Banana Ensete superbum.
- Non-fishy omega–3s from an underexploited Peruvian plant, sacha inchi or Plukenetia huayllabambana. Maybe extinction will soon beckon.
- Rewarding Kenyan dairy farmers for reducing harmful (bovine) emissions with no direct payments.
- “Eat millet and steer clear of disease” is the cry taken up by women in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.
- AoB blogger drinks deep of fermentative biodiversity.
- And if you happen to be in Hawaii on 2 March, and are a fan of breadfruit and coconut, don’t miss The Second Annual Puna ‘Ulu Festival—‘Ulu a me Niu.
News from the John Innes Centre in England
I confess, we had a bit of fun at the expense of the John Innes Centre yesterday. They tweeted:
Crossing wheat and peas – “how to” guides youtube.com/user/jicgermpl… Also new pea variety traced to Rohde,famous gardener us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=43f5e67f7ce…
— John Innes Centre (@JohnInnesCentre) February 4, 2013
Oh, how we laughed. And replied:
MT @johninnescentre: Crossing wheat and peasyoutube.com/user/jicgermpl… < Nice trick if you can pull it off without #GM
— Nikolay Vavilov (@NIVavilov) February 4, 2013
All immensely amusing, but that shouldn’t detract either from the JIC Germplasm YouTube channel — with it’s handy dandy videos explaining how to cross wheats and how to cross peas — or Seed Bank News, to which you can subscribe.
This paragraph caught my eye
One heritage variety of maple or carlin pea has been passed to the collection (JI 3590) that can be traced back to the famous garden historian and horticultural writer Eleanour Sinclair Ronde [sic] in the late 1930’s. This is a culinary long vined type that has been maintained by a family in Shropshire where it has been regularly grown at 1200ft and noted as having a good degree of frost tolerance compared to other common varieties.
As a long-time fan of carlin peas, and all the great stories associated with them, I’d love to know exactly how they traced JI 3590 to Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. But that’s just me.
Do potatoes have to be humble?
Catching up with my podcast backlog, I’ve just listened to The Food Programme’s episode on Cheap Veg. All good stuff, and well worth listening to in full, especially to hear Sheila Dillon pronounce ethno-botanist as if it were some strange, exotic ingredient; which, I suppose, it is. But you’re all busy folk, so I have gone to the trouble of filleting out the potatoes, as it were. Listen to Oliver Moore as he visits the Irish Seed Savers Association and samples the many delights of potato diversity.
Nibbles: Drought, Forestry, Sustainable intensification, Horta, Tomatoes, Indian landraces, Seed Library, Wartime farming, EU legislation
- Is it too early to be talking about drought in the US?
- Or about collaborations between forestry and agriculture?
- How about the sustainable intensification of African agriculture?
- Enough of these rhetorical question, I hear you cry. Give us information! About wild greens on Crete.
- Or one person’s view of two remarkable tomatoes.
- Or how farmers in India seek – and find – seeds of older and traditional varieties.
- In Basalt, Colorado, you just pop into your local library. Rock on.
- In Toronto, Ontario, you watch TV to learn how your ex-overlords in Britain doubled food production in a few short growing seasons.
- And in Europe? You’re grateful to have received the same reply to your concerns about agricultural biodiversity as everyone else who shares those concerns.
Brainfood: Vitamin C, Nutrition and health, European protected areas, Coffea diversity, Climate change modelling, Soil microbes, Niche modelling, Conflict, Human modified landscapes, Horse diversity, Pigeon diversity
- The challenge of increasing vitamin C content in plant foods. Surely not just because it is challenging?
- Health economics and nutrition: a review of published evidence. “[A]pproaches and methodologies are sometimes ad hoc in nature and vary widely in quality.” Ain’t that always the way.
- European protected areas: Past, present and future. The future will need to be different from the past.
- Genetic structure and diversity of coffee (Coffea) across Africa and the Indian Ocean islands revealed using microsatellites. Good correspondence with morphological species. Madagascar a diversity hotspot.
- Special Issue of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology on Agricultural prediction using climate model ensembles. There’s more than one way to identify a potential adaptation hotspot. Well that’s reassuring. Not.
- Changes in soil microbial functional diversity under different vegetation restoration patterns for Hulunbeier Sandy Land. Restoring desertified grassland led to more soil microbial diversity. Which is good because…?
- A review of composition studies of Cameroon traditional dishes: Macronutrients and minerals. 117 of them. Good for Fe, Zn, Mg.
- Essential elements of discourse for advancing the modelling of species’ current and potential distributions. There’s lots of methods, all quite different, embrace the diversity.
- Understanding and managing conservation conflicts. Build up an evidence base, and employ some social scientists to explain it.
- On the hope for biodiversity-friendly tropical landscapes. In the end, it’s about the agriculture. In more ways than one.
- Genetic Diversity in the Modern Horse Illustrated from Genome-Wide SNP Data. High maternal, low paternal during domestication. Low diversity breeds the ones you’d expect. Similar breeds the ones you’d expect.
- Genomic Diversity and Evolution of the Head Crest in the Rock Pigeon. Middle Eastern origins, Darwin vindicated. Again.