- WorldVeg fights for the right of Pakistanis to grow mungbean.
- Philosopher thinks the English should fight for einkorn. Oh, and stilton.
- Botanist fights for botany.
- You gotta fight those species distribution models into submission. They don’t come quietly.
- Early farmers made love, not war. Or at least made cultic phallic symbols.
- Indians avoid Golden Rice fight by fortifying their own.
- Chicago fights to save its plants.
- You can’t fight extinction. I mean, once it’s happened.
- Aroids putting up a good fight with showier plants at Kew.
- Aquaculture in a fight for its life as disease looms.
Is this really a Roman mosaic of a pineapple?
Originally from the environs of the Villa Rufinella. Is it legit? And if truly ancient Roman, what is that in the upper right hand corner if not a pineapple?
LATER: I should add that I was pointed in the direction of that mosaic by a long, but fascinating, talk on “Mapping the Ancient Environment: The Contribution of Manuscripts and Texts,” 1 which in turn came to me thanks to a tweet from @mem_somerville.
Nibbles: Phenomics, Genomes, Indian cucurbits, Argania, Food in history, Sourghum & drought, USDA genebanks, Queenly pear, CIMMYT genebank, Malawi cowpea, Nutrition strategy
- Phenomics is the new genomics.
- No, wait. Peanuts to get a genome. A rice relative’s got one already.
- All the Cucurbitaceae of India, in one handy checklist.
- The paradox of argan oil.
- Couple of things on the history of food. And one on the ethics of food.
- Big push for drought-resistant sorghum. Wait, I thought it was drought-resistant already.
- Ft Collins gets yet another media write-up.
- Telegraph says Queen gets rare pear. Letter writer to Times begs to differ on the whole rarity thing. It sounds like, damn thing being (mostly) behind a paywall.
- If you’re on Facebook, why not like this photo of the CIMMYT maize genebank?
- Canada to help Malawi diversify. Into cowpeas.
- Big report on big nutrition meeting. Big deal?
Nibbles: Quinoazzzzz, Haiti seed bank, Guatemala seed bank, Seed systems, Hybrid wheat, OFSP, Fish characterization, Vanilla
- This quinoa thing is getting tedious.
- Clinton brings a seed bank to Haiti, “which will support efforts to increase agricultural production.” Will be interesting to see how exactly it does that.
- Whereas this seed bank in Guatemala “is empowering the local community to preserve and grow the seeds.” So there you go.
- Of course, those seed banks are going to need seed systems. And vice versa.
- And the next milestone in the continuing disempowering of the farmer is…
- Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes go aquatic. Where they’ll find fish that need to be compared.
- A Tongan vanilla tour.
Farmersourcing germplasm evaluation
Our friend and occasional contributor Jacob van Etten has been busy. He has a piece out over at the CCAFS blog describing his work in India on crowdsourcing the evaluation of wheat varieties in the context of climate change adaptation which has been attracting some attention. He’s blogged here before about getting seeds out to farmers, but he’s also published a bit more formally on the subject, and seems now to be putting his theories into practice now at Bioversity. More power to him. If you’d like to hear him explaining his work, rather than just reading about it, you can do that too.
A bit surprisingly, Jacob doesn’t particularly highlight 2 the role of genebanks in his CCAFS piece. It would be interesting to know why. Perhaps he can tell us here. Or on his Twitter account. Anyway, I’ve found a diagram on his Facebook page which suggests that he does think genebanks have a key role to play in diversified and resilient farming systems. Here it is, for those of you who are not his “friends.”
