- Where do spices come from, mummy?
- Even “good” tequila can be bad for you. Well I never.
- Sparkling tea? Call it a microwine. Via.
- More potatoes. …
- … but the kicker is the historical archive she links to.
- AGRA and Earth Institute to collaborate. Africa not available for comment.
- More Pacific food crop nutrition goodness from Lois et al.
- Children may not like their veggies because of the Ca content.
- Canada down to 95% Holsteins. Oh dear.
- “The large crop genetic diversity that already exists in Ethiopia will make adapting agricultural systems to the locally changing conditions relatively easy.” Well, maybe…
- Screening Kansas wheat varieties for resistance to wheat blast.
Cacao goes sustainable, yes, but how?
The World Cocoa Foundation is offering a guide to the cocoa industry on sustainability principles that focus on equitable profit, labour standards and environmental issues.
That’s from a press release. There’s something similar on the World Cocoa Foundations’s blog. But I can’t find anywhere on the WCF website the teach-yourself-sustainable-cacao-farming document that I was foolishly expecting.
I guess we’ll have to make do with some general aims:
The sustainability initiative commits the foundation and its members to working toward three categories; profit, people and planet.
For the people category, the aim is for healthy and thriving cocoa-farming communities, where international labour standards are followed and farming practices are safe.
The planet category refers to responsible, sound environmental stewardship in cocoa-farming communities where soil and water are conserved and Integrated Pest Management to limit the use of agricultural chemicals, protecting the fragile tropical ecosystem.
And in terms of profit, the aim is to improve equitable economic returns for farmers built upon expanding entrepreneurial skills, stronger and more effective farmer associations, and more productive, profitable farming practices.
and a bunch of example projects. Not much about the importance of genetic diversity, alas.
Tomato diversity in Google Earth
Here’s a fun thing. There’s a group pool on Flickr, the photo sharing site, called “tomatoes!” 1 All kinds of pictures of all kinds of tomatoes, and very beautiful is all that diversity to look at too. But you can do more. Like for example map where the photos were taken (assuming the photographer uploaded a georeference). Which could give you a snapshot of where tomatoes are grown or consumed — or maybe just particularly loved. You can also generate a kml file. Here’s what you get when you view it in Google Earth:
Haven’t quite worked it out. This doesn’t seem to be all the georeferenced tomato photos from Europe in the group. Maybe just the latest to be uploaded. But I can’t help thinking this is a great way of displaying the geographic distribution of agricultural biodiversity.
Nibbles: Wheat, Cotton, Dogs
Cooking the books
The news that the DNA in medieval parchments is to be fingerprinted has been making quite a splash. Parchments are made of animal skins, of course, and it seems that it is possible to recover DNA in decent shape — the latest example of archeogenetics. The idea is to produce “a taxonomy of manuscript manufacture,” which must be of tremendous excitement to medievalists. But John Hawks describes another possible application in his anthropological blog that’s more in line with our agrobiodiversity interests here:
…the results may be equally useful for understanding the processes of animal breeding in medieval Europe. Today’s domesticated breeds are a remnant of a much larger diversity of local breeds that once existed. People bred animals both locally by selection and across large regions by introducing favored animals from long distances. Sometimes they favored diversity — and considering the revival of interest in legacy breeds like Highland cattle.
Wish I’d thought of that…