- IITA set to expand its ability to provide the world with yam diversity.
- “Agricultural biodiversity is essential for farmers as it places them in a better position to manage climate change.” Wait, what?
- An exotic melon is found in Birmingham, UK. But can you make juice from its seeds?
- James dissects the latest genome announcement: cacao. Ignore the press release, just read this.
- Biotropica has a special issue on biodiversity. Even some agrobiodiversity.
- The history of food consumption in the 20th century. Scary reading.
- New Internationalist magazine has a special issue on seed saving! But only a couple of articles available online, alas.
- Wonderful photos of the rice harvest from Flickr.
- Mongolian cashmere can only get more expensive.
- Australians have more to cope with than a back-stabbing prime minister, it seems. Their eucalypts are in trouble. Something to do with fire, maybe.
Water, water everywhere, and nowhere
More on that social networking juxtaposition phenomenon. ICIMOD posts to YouTube about villages in Nepal being “In the grip of drought.” And follows it up a few minutes later about “Living with floods” in Assam. Intentional, I hope and think. Meanwhile, SciDevNet looks into the question of whether there’s much more where that came from.
Illustrating cow dung
One of the joys of social networking is the serendipitous juxtapositions that it regularly throws up. Case in point. This morning a piece from ILRI turned up in my Facebook newsfeed:
Climate change may be combated by changing the diet of livestock, whose farting and manure, along with the feed crops produced, contribute to 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.
Nothing strange about that. ILRI blog posts get automatically sucked up into Facebook via NetworkedBlogs. But how weird is it that just below that item there was one of a photo by the wonderful Claude Renault featuring cow dung? You can also see it on Claude’s Flickr site, along with a number of others on the same topic. Any of which would have been a much more interesting accompaniment to ILRI’s otherwise perfectly fine piece than the rather boring picture of a cow they actually used. I’m not sure even Claude Renault could have managed to produce a compelling illustration of cows farting, mind, though people have tried.
LATER: Not that social networking doesn’t have its problems. Facebook didn’t allow me to post this note as a comment to either of the posts mentioned above, claiming that some of the content was found offensive by some users.
Nibbles: Maize RNA, Hybrids, Cacao, Banana stats, Biofuels, Barley water, Ecosystem services, Coca, Chinese medicinals, Hunger
- Maize boffins move on to RNA. Hard row to hoe.
- The coolness of hybrids. No, not the cars. Includes crop wild relatives.
- Bioversity makes the case that cacao is charismatic. Hard row to hoe.
- IITA tries to crowdsource banana production data. Hard row to hoe. BTW, why not include variety information? Well, maybe they will.
- Jatropha rebooted?
- The history of barley water. Surprisingly weird.
- Cory Bradshaw’s presentation on the global erosion of ecosystem services. A quick look reveals little on that often overlooked service: the provision of diversity for agriculture.
- The importance of coca in Andean culture.
- Chinese medicinal herbs doing just fine in North Carolina.
- FAO hunger report parsed by The Guardian.
The CGIAR and agrobiodiversity
The latest issue of the CGIAR’s e-newsletter does a number on agrobiodiversity, in an effort to position the system for Nagoya. 1 But what about that megaprogramme, then?