- Drought threatens rare rice varieties. What d’you mean they’re not in genebanks?
- Has video dimmed the radio’s star?
- Wanna get a PhD in “climate services for development“? Course you do.
- Apple harvest fails. Turns out you need a diversity of agricultural labourers too.
- Medlars. I love it when people treat my familiar stuff as highly exotic.
The cause of the problem …
… was a growing sensation that our RSS feed — served through Google’s Feedburner — could be a liability, as there are signs that Google is neglecting Feedburner. If you’re reading this in a Feed Reader, you might want to change the details to point to https://agro.biodiver.se/feed/ or just delete and subscribe again, which should pick up the feed automagically.
The bigger problem is the people who subscribe by email. We think we’ve sorted this out too, by adding all existing subscribers to a new list at MailChimp. If you are one of those, you should be seeing this message in an email. If you want to continue getting a daily update by email, there’s no need to do anything else. If you want to unsubscribe, there’s a link at the bottom of the email.
I hope that’s all …
Apologies for the downtime
I know just enough about web servers to be dangerous, as anyone who has tried to visit the site since last Saturday knows. For this, I am really sorry. I think most things are now back to normal, although there are clearly problems with the categories. ((I hate categories anyway, being a freetext search kind of person, so the whole question is moot for now.)) And some things are just plain weird, still. These things take time. We’ll be thinking about the design; maybe going back to the old one, maybe trying something new. And we value your loyalty. So if there’s something not working, leave a comment here, or something.
The truly scary thing is the realisation that we are fast coming up on our 6th birthday. Perhaps everything will be working perfectly by then.
Here’s hoping.
Wow! I did it, and with a week to spare. Now just a couple of minor changes under the hood, as it were, and she’ll be good for another 5000 posts.
Nibbles: Future diets, Trust Annual Report, Vermiculture, Daisies not dope
- Diets of 2062 will be as unfamiliar to us as our diets are to our grandparents.
- What the Global Crop Diversity Trust did in 2011.
- Big time worm farming.
- Alberta dope cops lousy botanists.
Desperately seeking data
We’re trying something new here, trying to keep on the cutting edge of the inter webs.
What happened was, a couple of days ago, we saw a video about a warning service for UK growers of winter oilseed rape (aka canola). There’s a model that predicts when fungus outbreaks are particularly likely, so farmers don’t have to spray with fungicide on a schedule, rather than when most needed.
That’s good. But, just out of interest, I wondered how much diversity there is in the resistance to the two prime fungal threats among the varieties of oilseed rape grown in the UK. Because, maybe, farmers and researchers there could even consider whether sowing a mixture might give them as much protection as a fungicide. Just a thought, y’know.
What followed (curated and enlivened thanks to Luigi’s efforts) was https://wtcampaigns.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/ash-dieback-chalara/, and not in a particularly good way. ((Luigi’s lively curation was originally done in Storify, but when that died in 2018 we had to make that ugly PDF out of it.))
Bottom line: there is actually a lot of data at the HGCA, but it is in PDFs, which makes it harder to do any sort of analysis, and I couldn’t find anything on the area planted to specific varieties. Oh, and the email trail went cold very quickly.