- “By fitting gold wires to the back of individual whitefly and measuring the electro-chemical signals as they fed on the plant sap, the team found the insects spent more time ‘roaming’ and less time feeding on the wild varieties than those which settled on the commercial plants.”
- New Iraqi plants includes onion wild relative.
- Early farmers couldn’t stop fiddling with the bones of their dead.
- “That message has come through clearly. Flavor is a priority because if people don’t want to eat carrots, they’re not going to buy them.”
Nibbles: Poleward migration, Pulse infographic, Vodka, Ancient horse DNA, Old fish, Certified cacao, On farm book, Coarse millets, Banana diversity, Pearl millet demo
- Species flying poleward.
- FAO unveils pulse infographic. No word on whether any are harvestable by machine.
- Potato farmer adds value the old-fashioned way.
- Talking of old, here’s a really old horse.
- And the oldest evidence of fermentation for food preservation. But you’ll need a strong stomach.
- KitKat is certified crap.
- How (and Why) Farmers Maintain Crop Diversity: The Book. Some reviews.
- And here’s a specific example from India.
- And here, courtesy of Bioversity’s Ann Tutwiler, is why farmers need some help sometimes.
- Oh and here’s another one. People visit ICRISAT genebank in Niger, see stuff they like.
Nibbles: Pharaonic bull, Moving the cheese, Popping the corn, Persian food double, Sweet potato galore
- Cattle in ancient Egypt.
- Because yesterday was National Cheese Day and we missed it.
- The protein to which we owe cheese.
- The anatomy of popcorn.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison interviewed on Iranian saffron.
- And more Persian foodstuffs.
- Orange sweet potato going wide in Mozambique. And where it came from.
Mapping the Neolithic Revolution
Somehow we missed this great map of the Fertile Crescent from National Geographic. It came out just before Christmas, but we should have caught it, really. I hope they do similar ones for other cradles of agriculture around the world.
Nibbles: Svalbard, Fish tissue, Homegardens, Mothers’ seeds double, Citrus diversity, Paul Smith, Pulses, Hohokam, Nutrition profiles, Zulu cattle poetry, Cereals & CC, Soil biodiversity
- Svalbard on the BBC.
- Fish biorepository in Penang.
- Kitchen gardens in Kenya.
- Mothers transmitting seeds and knowledge to their daughters.
- Challenges faced by female farmers in preserving seeds after harvest: leave your suggestions. Maybe they could talk to the above?
- Trying to save citrus.
- Paul Smith of BGCI wins the Fairchild Medal. Congrats!!!
- The Washington Post has its finger on the pulses.
- “…a peaceful, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic economic system stretching from New Mexico to California that persisted for 600 years…”
- Country Nutrition Profiles: the infographics.
- The most beautiful cattle in the world.
- Extreme weather has been bad for cereals. Well I never.
- Threats to Europe’s soil biodiversity.