- That 2000-year old date palm seed is all grown up.
- And since we’re talking ancient stuff: ornithology in the service of egyptology.
- Citizen scientists track phenology.
- Citizen scientists find new species.
- Let’s hear it for cover crops.
- Turns out it’s ok for hipsters to eat quinoa.
- Sorghum takes over the Great Plains. (Well, not really.) And not only… Who needs quinoa.
- Especially when you have teff.
- And while we’re on gluten: need to make up for that off-colour quip in the last Nibbles.
- Malnutrition. Mapped. Including that much-discussed Missing Middle? Hang on, wait, here’s another nutrition mapping thing.
- African leafy greens in Benin get a video. Map that!
- Farmers make good extensionists.
- Chocolate workshops at Kew.
- Caribbean chocolate to get a make-over. Somebody telling Kew?
Nibbles: Old pretzel, Wine podcast, Nordic podcast, Tea history, Pacific pests app, Eating bugs, Chicken history, African superfoods, Gender, Access to seeds, Sorghum beer, Making mead, Cumin, Bolivian school meals, MLN, Hidden hunger conference, CIP & IK, Potato Park, CIP’s Sawyer, Saving wheat, Resettlement, Sustainable cacao, Deforestation map, Language map
Again, sorry for slow blogging last week. Work, you know. Here we play catch-up.
- While we were away, we reached 6000 Twitter followers! Thanks, everyone!
- And Germans found a 250-year-old pretzel. Wait, you can get those at Kamps every day though. (Bonn inside joke.)
- Oh, and Jeremy talked to a wine expert about how to become a wine expert.
- But he has competition from the Nordic Food Lab now. What are you waiting for, subscribe to both!
- Since we’re on podcasts, Laszlo Montgomery’s monumental ten-part blockbuster on the history of tea in China recently came to a close.
- Talking of iTunes, ver. 2 of the Pacific Pest and Pathogens app is out.
- Don’t want to get into the whole eating insects thing? Feed them to your chickens instead.
- There’s even an infographic about that now.
- But what will it do to the poor old chicken?
- Cooking up some African superfoods. No insects (or chickens) were harmed in the making of this article.
- Yeah but who will be doing the cooking?
- And where to get the seeds? Maybe African Seed Access Index will help, though I somehow doubt it. At least for baobab.
- Oh well, there’s always beer I guess. (Though even that you can’t take for granted these days.)
- Or mead, at a pinch.
- I bet the Sumerians put a pinch of cumin in their beer. And mead.
- What about Latin America superfoods, though? Bolivians put them in their school meals, that’s what.
- Maize was a Latin American superfood once. Having trouble in Africa now, though.
- Wait, what, there was a 2nd International Congress on Hidden Hunger at the University of Hohenheim last week? And all I got was this t-shirt? Any superfoods on the menu there, I wonder?
- CIP on how it deals with traditional knowledge.
- For example at the Potato Park. Where I’ll be next week, incidentally. Stay tuned… But again, I rather fear that blogging will be on the light side next week.
- CIP has come a long way since its first DG, Dr Richard L. Sawyer, who sadly just passed away.
- Modelling the effects of climate change on wheat. Again. Can never have enough data. Anyway, wild relatives the answer?
- Mongolian nomads settle down. And not in a good way.
- There’s more to sustainable cacao than productivity. Fortunately, some people are on that. Meanwhile, at the other end of the poverty spectrum…
- Don’t think I’ve ever seen a nerdy interactive map like Global Forest Watch go mainstream. Hope for us all. Mash it up with this next?
Brainfood: Biodiversity and health, Medieval cattle, African livestock sustainability, Filipino rice, Coffee breeding, Land-sparing conundrum, Scrapie resistant goats, Ass-like equid evolution, GS in livestock breeding, Eucalypt diversity & drought, Ecosystem services of organic ag
- Relationships between agrobiodiversity, dietary diversity and nutritional status in Tanzania. It’s really complicated.
- Microsatellite genotyping of medieval cattle from central Italy suggests an old origin of Chianina and Romagnola cattle. DNA from a couple of cattle breeds from central Italy shows remarkable similarities with that from thousand-old bones from an archaeological site in the same area.
- Strategies and approaches to sustainable livestock production in Sub Saharan Africa. It will depend on women.
- Strategies and initiatives on rice genetic resources conservation and research for climate change adaptation. Among the 1506 traditional rice varieties in the Philippines genebank are 3 which could be drought tolerant and 9 collected from really saline areas. They’re being sequenced for gene discovery.
- Next generation variety development for sustainable production of arabica coffee (Coffea arabica L.): a review. Local breeding, plus international networking.
- Why biodiversity declines as protected areas increase: the effect of the power of governance regimes on sustainable landscapes. Modelling shows land-sharing may outperform land-sparing in the long run. Most interesting consequence of the insights derived is that perhaps protected areas should be placed near agricultural frontiers rather than where biodiversity or cost-effectiveness highest.
- Biodiversity and selection for scrapie resistance in goats: genetic polymorphism in “Girgentana” breed in Sicily, Italy. Resistance gene more common in this weird breed than in the one that’s usually used in breeding.
- Reassessing the evolutionary history of ass-like equids: Insights from patterns of genetic variation in contemporary extant populations. I urge you to read the abstract yourselves and marvel at the author’ success in using the word ass-like the maximum possible number of times.
- Opinion paper: emerging markets, emerging strategies under the genomic revolution. Genomic selection is an organizational revolution as much as a technological one. At least in animal breeding.
- Genetic diversity of Eucalyptus camaldulensis Dehnh. following population decline in response to drought and altered hydrological regime. It stayed the same, I guess because of gene flow.
- Significance and value of non-traded ecosystem services on farmland. Value of biological control of pests and nitrogen mineralisation provided by organic agriculture of peas, beans, barley and wheat (extrapolated from 20 fields in NZ to whole of temperate zone) was greater than global costs of insecticides and fertilizers, even if only 10% of global arable area was converted to organic.
Nibbles: Smelly yeast, Native American products, Perennial rice, Ag origins
- Yeast perfume. Great for Valentine’s Day.
- Webinar of discussion on “Origin Products and Native American Tribes: EU and U.S. Law and Policy.”
- The perennial attraction of perennial rice.
- Ancient Nubians knew domesticated wheat and barley earlier than thought. But not as early as Britons.
Nibbles: Genebank data, Edible smut, Edible bugs, Healthful bluberries, Mining Indian food, Funny spuds pix, Old grape pits, Old einkorn stash, Phylogeny & conservation double, Rhizobacteria, Rapid phenotyping, Plata periurban ag, BRICs in Africa, Chinese terraces, SMTA
- GRIN-Global comes to Portugal. That makes two.
- Eating fungi.
- Eating bugs.
- Eating Indian.
- Eating blueberries is good for you.
- Would you eat these funny-looking potatoes?
- Veg ink.
- Old grape seed in Israel.
- Old einkorn seed in England.
- Atlas of Living Australia to include phylogenetic data. Kew thinking along same lines too.
- Grasses can absorb organic N. With some help.
- “Today’s international scientific community is dominated by big mercenaries who change their teams’ research subjects to get on the cover of Nature.” But INRA isn’t like that, apparently, at least with regards to high-throughput phenotyping.
- Argentinian periurban farmers grow varieties they like to eat. Well, it’s good to have the data.
- Rounding up China and Brazil in African agriculture.
- Meanwhile, back home, famous rice terraces are being used to grow maize.
- SMTA 101.