- A bibliography of sesame. Good to have.
- All you want to know about organic farming in China. Who knows when it might come in useful.
- The legacy of Melaku Worede. Proud to know him.
- European pre-breeding meeting. Would be good to go.
- The Spice Trade 2.0. Good gig if you can get it.
- Coconut-tasting pineapple. Why?
Endlessly debating agriculture
Don’t get me wrong, I think a robust exchange of views on agricultural development is a good thing, even essential. But when you’ve got “Achieving food and environmental security — new approaches to close the gap” at the Royal Society one week, followed by “The Future of Agriculture: debate the experts” a matter of days thereafter, you begin to wonder whether we are on the receiving end of way too much of a good thing. Having said that, needless to add that we’re incredibly interested in the results of these discussions, and if you take part and would like to summarize them for us here, you’d be more than welcome. To prospective organizers of such things my suggestion is that you stand back a minute and ask: what would be new here?
Nibbles: Desert afforestation, Breadfruit, Sustainable tea, Biofortification, Cassava breeding, Wheat breeding, Ancient microbrewery
- The Sahara Forest Project: what could possibly go wrong?
- Maybe they should try breadfruit. Or avocados. Or ask this guy for advice.
- Not for all the sustainable tea in China!
- Or all the high-Fe pearl millet in India.
- Or all the wild chickens in South Asia.
- Cassava gets the genomic selection treatment. Maybe wheat too?
- Did someone mention beer?
FSA takes over ICARDA buildings
Free Syrian Army fighters have, in their words on the video below, “liberated” ICARDA. Our thoughts are with the international staff, still working from different locations around the region (most of the genebank personnel are in Tunisia), and especially the local staff, trying to survive in and around Aleppo.
@AgroBioDiverse Luigi, don't get shocked. ICARDA facility has been looted. Cars are with FSA now. Watch this http://t.co/qB85xJhw #ICARDA
— Dr. Joshka Wessels (@joshkawessels) December 1, 2012
Brainfood: Bumper bonanza, Old peas, Irrigated meadows, Cereal mashes, Medicinal plants, Diversity and production, Millet gaps, Seed ageing, Flax core
- First off — a pretty big deal. Taylor & Francis have made a bunch of papers related to sustainable agriculture freely available, but only until the end of December. Happy whatever holiday won’t offend you.
- Twentieth-century changes in the genetic composition of Swedish field pea metapopulations. Metapopulations have become isolated populations. In genebanks.
- Effects of different irrigation systems on the biodiversity of species-rich hay meadows. Change from the traditional irrigation system has affected biodiversity levels, but not a huge amount.
- Research regarding the use of wheat biodiversity for obtaining some cereal-based fermented mashes. Let’s go straight to what we need to know here: the best mash come from spelt wheat. Oh, to be the one doing the organoleptic characterization.
- Cultivation and high capitalization of medicinal and aromatic plants in the Romanian-Bulgarian cross-border region. If you’re really interested, there’s a database that brings it all together.
- Crop biodiversity, productivity and production risk: Panel data micro-evidence from Ethiopia. More crops = more production. But the devil is in the details, I suspect.
- Identification of gaps in pearl millet germplasm from East and Southern Africa conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. We used to do this sort of thing by hand in my day.
- At3g08030 transcript: a molecular marker of seed ageing. This mRNA could predict germination performance of a dry seed lot across species. Good for genebanks?
- Assembling a core collection from the flax world collection maintained by Plant Gene Resources of Canada. You don’t hear much about core collections these days, why is that?