- Farming cobia off Panama. Look it up.
- Gene editing is the future. But is it GM?
- More on the CIMMYT genebank from the Australian press. Get a room already.
- Fancy machine can tell fancy Yemeni coffee from lesser stuff. No, not DNA. Producers of lesser stuff unavailable for comment.
- Some of them may end up being photographed by National Geographic though.
- Before being forced off their land.
- Different sort of land grab in the Gran Chaco. Pity those poor wild Arachis. And here’s a meta-analysis of the drivers of the problem.
- Feeling left out, herders get fancy photos too.
- “The data indicates a broad distribution of this clone from Spain to Russia and Scotland to Cypress.” Good grief. Potato blight, if you’re still interested.
- From household survey data to food security assessment: The software.
- The bubbleberry is increasingly a thing.
South Pacific genebank overture
Can’t resist posting this video from my old colleagues at SPC. It ends a bit abruptly, but Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees, and a nice overview of its work.
LATER: This is the full version of the video, without that weird abrupt ending. Some problem with the uploading, apparently.
Nibbles: New plant journal, Randomized trials under fire, WB to the rescue, Spirit in the sky, Please sir may I have some more, Flour powerless, Tom Payneless, Collecting for CIP, Regen redux, Cultivating my garden, Animal Crackers, Ethnomycology
- Nature has new Plants journal. With blog.
- More from the randomized trials backlash frontlines.
- World Bank sets up internal task force on climate smart agriculture. Oh good.
- No word on whether spiritual values on agenda.
- Hacking the school lunch.
- Indian flour mills winding down. Implications for crop diversity unknown.
- Big Australian writeup of CIMMYT genebank.
- Big CIP writeup of CIP genebank. And other collections, to be fair.
- It’s the regeneration, stupid.
- Gardens save plants.
- Sustainable diets defined to within an inch of their lives. Common factor is less animal products. But, as Susan McMillan of ILRI points out, for whom, and where?
- Traditional Maori use of weird fungus.
Protecting apple images
I really like this diagram of the family tree of the Jazz apple, A New Zealand-bred favourite.
Problem is, I may be breaking some sort of law reproducing it here. The website where I found it, Te Ara, or the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, says, at the bottom of each page, that:
All text licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence unless otherwise stated. Commercial re-use may be allowed on request. All non-text content is subject to specific conditions. © Crown Copyright.
Well, I don’t really want to use the text, certainly not commercially, so that means specific conditions apply. What might they they?
This item has been provided for private study purposes (such as school projects, family and local history research) and any published reproduction (print or electronic) may infringe copyright law. It is the responsibility of the user of any material to obtain clearance from the copyright holder.
It also gives an indication of how to cite the item, which I am happy to do: Ross Galbreath. ‘Agricultural and horticultural research — Advances in plant science’, Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 14-Nov-12 URL.
I left comments on the item on two occasions, asking for permission to use the image. No reply. I then emailed the general address provided on the About page. No reply. So, having waited a decent interval, I’m going for it. Let’s see what happens. I hope someone wanting permission to use the apple for breeding purposes finds it more straightforward than accessing the image in which it features.
Yeah. Diversity is nice, but…
I find the whole debate about Golden Rice pretty boring. Not because I don’t think the subject — GR in and of itself, and as a symbol of something bigger — is important. Rather, because I think it’s very important to have a debate, but the way this is being conducted at the moment is just not likely, it seems to me, to lead to anything more than the further entrenchment of fixed positions.
For example, if you want a good encapsulation of (one side of) the wider argument, you could do a lot worse than this, from Richard Manning in Mother Earth News:
…the industrial ag folks and the Green Revolutionaries challenge us: “Yeah. Diversity is nice, but can sustainable agriculture feed the world’s population?” And then they rig the game by defining “feed” in just the same way they define agriculture — a narrow, linear process of input, throughput, output, yield per acre, calories per bushel, calories per person.
Now that’s hip and engaging, and makes its point in accessible, pithy fashion; but look at the tone — that disdainful “yeah” — and the loaded words used — words like “rig.” A couple of days ago, even before I’d seen this article, I was sort of indirectly accused on Twitter of not caring if children go blind from Vitamin A deficiency, because I had said that the debate — if it can even be called that — had become sterile: it’s not so sterile if you have VAD, was the counter. Right. That’s the reductio ad absurdum of the sort of the tone and language of the Manning article.
So it’s very welcome to see that Michael Pollan and Pamela Ronald, poster children for the two sides of the argument, have recently engaged in what has been described as a “respectful dialogue.” Hopefully more details will emerge, and a precedent will have been set, and we can move on from the boring — there’s really no other word for it — spectacle of people talking past each other.
LATER: And here it is, all two hours of it.