- FAO has guidelines for making sure climate adaptation plans include crop diversity.
- A new agricultural biodiversity newsletter for your reading pleasure.
- And a new blog of global sustainability issues from Jonathan Foley.
- The Beaver Dam pepper back from the brink.
- Nice set of slides summarizing the Plant Treaty.
- The traditional Thanksgiving save-heirloom-turkeys story.
- Farming changed people.
- Crop elders?
- Women speak out about traditional African veggies.
How was this harpago used?
I finally got to see the Feeding the Empire exhibit at the Ara Pacis in Rome on Saturday, and learned a lot about how Rome managed to keep a million people fed most of the time. In one of the display cases, I saw this astonishing implement.
It was labelled simply Harpago. No explanation, nothing. The word seems to be linked to harpoon, and is translated as “grappling iron” in some places. It also shows up “in insect morphology for the distal end of a genital clasper” and lends its name to spiny sea snails and a plant commonly known as Devil’s claw, Harpagophytum spp.
All of which makes perfect sense. But what on earth does it have to do with the preparation of food?
Nibbles: Tomato breeding, Cacao phylogeny, Moroccan fig landraces, Filipino homegardens, Neolithic honey, LandMark, I say queso
- Breeding for organic tomatoes needs to be participatory.
- Theobroma cacao is the oldest species within the genus.
- Threatened local fig varieties being promoted in Morocco.
- Teach a fisherman to garden…
- Neolithic people were consuming honey early, but not in the north of Europe.
- Interactive map showing lands managed by native communities.
- The oldest surviving document in spanish is a list of cheeses.
Nibbles: Seed Treaty, Grelo festival, Large tomatoes, Saffron collecting, Enset redux, Grassland diversity, Census 2016, Organic definition, Dalit seeds, Ancient wheat DNA, Ancient American farmers, Tree adaptation, Syrian crops at OFN
- What civil society said at the latest Governing Body meeting of the ITPGRFA earlier this month.
- Google Translate fail puts spotlight on the cruciferous crop I’ve always known as fiarielli but which is sometimes called rapini. Both names kinda suck.
- That’s one huge tomato.
- That’s one expensive spice.
- Rediscovering enset.
- Grassland biodiversity good for resilience to climate change.
- Global agriculture: here comes the data.
- Deconstructing organic. The word, that is.
- Empowering dalit farmers by recognizing their knowledge of seeds.
- That ancient underwater wheat DNA wasn’t so ancient after all. Maybe.
- It was migrants who forced the ancestors of the Pueblo people to move.
- Local adaptation in trees: what has it ever done for us?
- Another way to safeguard Syrian crop diversity.
Nibbles: Superfood, Superbits, Climate change, CWR, Grape names
- Make way for Dovyalis hebecarpa, aka the Ceylon gooseberry, your new favourite superfood for the week.
- US$6.5 million to breed better cucurbits. Maybe.
- Rise and fall of agrarian states influenced by climate volatility. Those who do not understand history etc.
- Bioversity urges crop wild relatives to avoid the fate of the dodo.
- Name that grape! An extraordinary online resource for Italian ampelography.