- Conservation project fails to work. But lessons are learned.
- The archaeology of grasspea. Mainly Aegean, as it turns out.
- Artificial selection can help fill gaps left by other kind.
- Nestlé accused of stealing roiboos.
- Tea or frog?
Nibbles: Endangered African breeds, Rice and bananas, AGRA, Adaptation, Old Masters
- ILRI continues its attempt to take over the internet.
- Dorian Fuller summarizes rice in Madagascar in a paragraph. Good trick. And for his next one he rounds up the latest on bananas. The guy’s a machine.
- No adaptation without agrobiodiversity, rapt masses told. And here, like manna from heaven, is an example. Well, sort of.
- Bruegel on agriculture. With picture goodness.
Nibbles: Sorghum and rice and climate change, Pacific agrobiodiversity today and yesterday, Japanese microbiota, Wolf domestication, Organic and fungi, Crop wild relatives, Bees, Hunger, Silk
- Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
- Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
- More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
- More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
- Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
- Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
- Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
- Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
- Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
- Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?
Nibbles: Mpingo, Chickpea, Oak, Amaranth
- At last, sustainable clarinets!
- Hummus war gets serious. All that seratonin not helping?
- “Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men.” Simon Schama on Quercus robur. Note to BBC: learn how to write species names.
- Pop quiz: Some 20,000 tons of this seed were delivered by Aztec farmers in annual tribute to their emperor, Montezuma. Now big in the US, according to NYTimes piece. From 1984.
Nibbles: Conservation, Women, Subsidies, Bees, Microbes, Rhizobia, Genebanks, Chicken history, Nordic genebank
- Academics say conservation of biodiversity does not benefit the poor. Maybe they’re talking about the wrong kind of biodiversity?
- Innovation of the Week: Feeding Communities by Focusing on Women. I think my irony detector may be on the fritz.
- All you ever wanted to know about farm subsidies in the US. h/t Food Politics.
- The Bittersweet Dreams of Uruguay’s Beekeepers. Sad.
- State microbes! Really fun, and informative. Any better ideas?
- More microbes: The evolution of nitrogen fixation. Absolutely fascinating.
- Slideshow on genebanks in southern Africa.
- Pre-Columbian, Polynesian chickens in Chile not Polynesian and probably not pre-Columbian. Blast! Why must fun theories always run up against the brick wall of facts?
- NordGen’s annual report: crops, forests, livestock.