Archaeology

Nibbles: Traditional medicine, Agroforestry, IK and adaptation, Paprika, Sustainability, Wheat, Rape, Wild foods, Beetroots, Potatoes, Curcurbits, Guar bonanza, Shipwrecked nuts

Kenyan herbal medicines in the spotlight.
Kenyan indigenous trees in the spotlight. The intersection of those two sets would be interesting to explore.
And then if you mash it up with this…
… you might still never predict rural Malawi to explode with interest in paprika.
And yet, (a small bit of) rural America embraces (a version of) sustainability.
While Bangladeshi farmers embrace participatory wheat variety selection. No idea what they found; the link there is down.
Next up, participatory selection for efficient use of phosphorus by rape?
This week’s super-modern chef sourcing strange stuff from the semi-wild gets it in New Jersey.
Beetroot diversity. Ignore the recipes; focus on the chart of nutrition; has that research been published?
As for potatoes, the People’s Plot thrives on Olympic glory.
Quick now: what links Sicily to Kenya? Both make meals of cucurbit leaves!
OK clever clogs: what links a neglected legume with destructive energy recovery practices? Fracking guar gum, that’s what! (h/t BPA.)
Nuts, isn’t it? Anyone up for sequencing some 16th century coconuts?

Pepe gets a prize from a queen.
The Princess of the Pea gives no prizes, though.
Oldest farming village in a Mediterranean island found on Cyprus. No royalty, alas.
The Emperor of Agricultural Statistical Handbooks is out. Oh, and the online source of the raw data has just got some new clothes.
Fish are in trouble. Well, not all. Kingfish, queenfish, king mackerel and emperor angelfish all unavailable for comment.
No royalty connected with these beautiful pictures of Asian fish either. Does a former Dutch consul count?
Quite a crown on this wild goat.
The Royal (geddit?) Botanic Gardens Kew’s Breathing Planet Campaign: The Video.
ICIMOD on the role bees (including, presumably, their queens) in mountain agriculture.

The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?

And Kenya’s best agriculture blog is…Tracking The Scent! Congrats Kio Wachira!
Drinking beer as an agricultural act.
CRP4 needs a new name.
Meanwhile, here’s another example of CGIAR centres working together. Not clear if it’s in a CRP, though, and if so what it is called.
Horse domesticated once, but with occasional restocking.