- He turns around in wonder, and what do you think he sees? The Georgia militia eating goober peas! Listen in full.
- Military-style rabble occupy the farm.
- Not to be outdone, China is buying up American agriculture, in many ways.
- Which is fine, because Israel to help US improve African agriculture. Africa not available for comment.
- Don’t talk to me about subsidies. Bad calories cheaper than good nutrition. Doh!
- Talk to me about this very pretty article on Crop Wild Relatives and their Potential for Crop Improvement instead.
- West Africans understood how to do that. Blog about search for the origins of West African agriculture.
- Move aside quinoa and family farming; Estonia wants 2016 to be The Year of Rye.
Nibbles: Anna Laurent, Sequencing, Gossypium, Capsicum, Native Americans, Journal, Genebank, Hairy fruit, JIC, Tasty tulips
- Design guru talks botany. Latest plant getting the treatment is the Hawaiian Cotton Tree. Which, despite its name, really is a (remote) cotton wild relative.
- What has Next Generation Sequencing ever done for me? And what you should know about how it works.
- And here’s an example of it at work: different cultivated cotton species have behaved differently, genetically speaking.
- That used ancient DNA, this one didn’t, but I guess a future one on chiles might. LATER: Ooops, just realized this is old. So what was it doing in my RSS feed?
- Speaking of chiles, here’s a couple of more things on Native American agriculture.
- Free access to the first issue of volume 20 of Journal for Nature Conservation for the next 12 months.
- Rebuilding the genebank in Ivory Coast.
- Discovering the wonders of the coconut. Their headline, not mine.
- The latest news from the John Innes Centre’s genebank.
- Fancy a tulip? To eat, that is.
Nibbles: Ag history, Kuk, Vegetables in PNG, Tonka beans, Bio-villages
- Cambridge University summarizes the 10,000-year journey “from foraging to farming”.
- A journey that’s still taking place at the Kuk Early Agricultural World Heritage Site in Papua New Guinea.
- Where researchers are working with farmers to see which vegetables grow best where.
- Tonka beans (Dipteryx odorata) are the foundation of a conservation programme in Venezuela.
- Bio-villages in Bangladesh, “to improve food security and increase the supply of nutritionally rich food”. Supported by IRRI!
Brainfood: Dietary diversity, Diversity and diseases, Soil IK, Insect symbionts, Rhizobia, Wild lettuce, Tree genetic erosion, Pre-domestication barley, Strampelli
- Relating dietary diversity and food variety scores to vegetable production and socio-economic status of women in rural Tanzania. Dietary diversity was all too often alarmingly low, and when it was it was associated with seasonal fluctuations in the production and collecting of vegetables. But a more varied diet need not necessarily be healthier, so more procedural sophistication will be necessary in follow-up studies.
- A risk-minimizing argument for traditional crop varietal diversity use to reduce pest and disease damage in agricultural ecosystems of Uganda. For Musa and beans, more varietal diversity meant less damage and less variation in damage.
- Exploring farmers’ local knowledge and perceptions of soil fertility and management in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Soils which farmers described as being more fertile were, ahem, more fertile.
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Important because they can confer protection from natural enemies, among other things. They behave a bit, but not entirely, like beneficial nuclear mutations.
- Widespread fitness alignment in the legume–rhizobium symbiosis. There are no cheaters.
- Genetic polymorphism in Lactuca aculeata populations and occurrence of natural putative hybrids between L. aculeata and L. serriola. Not much diversity in Israel, surprisingly. But isozymes?
- Meta-Analysis of Susceptibility of Woody Plants to Loss of Genetic Diversity through Habitat Fragmentation. The standard story — that trees suffer less genetic erosion because they are long-lived — is apparently wrong, even for wind pollinated trees.
- Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria. “This was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals.”
- Nazareno Strampelli, the ‘Prophet’ of the green revolution. Before Norman, there was Nazareno.
- The memory remains: application of historical DNA for scaling biodiversity loss. Historical collections of salmon scales reveal many connections between modern evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in the Columbia River and old ones; but also, intriguingly, some differences.
Nibbles: Ancient sauce, Easter eggs, REDD and biodiversity
- Ancient fish sauce recreated.
- Easter egg symbolism deconstructed.
- Monitoring biodiversity in REDD projects. Including CWR?