Archaeology

Nibbles: Atlantic potatoes, Andean feasting, Lupin biodiversity, Vegetable grafting, Agrobiodiversity survey, Seed lending library, Lathyrus factsheet, Wild horses, School feeding

Tracing Canary Island potatoes back to the Andes.
Lupin diversity, all in one handy place.
Bangladeshi women are grafting away.
Wanna take a survey of “lessons learned about ways and means to conserve and use genetic diversity to build resilience to climate change in food and agriculture systems“? Uhm.
Maybe they should survey this guy.
Kew takes on the grasspea.
I have my freedom but I don’t have much time…
FAO spots a win-win-win in school feeding programme linked to family farms.

Those who like that sort of thing will no doubt enjoy this discussion at Biofortified of that recent paper about a herbicide resistance transgene possibly giving a fitness advantage to weeds. And more.
As for me, I’d rather read about Neolithic spices. Or beer.
Some food companies more committed to nutrition than others shock. But good to have the data.
Bananas to the rescue in cacao plantations. If I had the willpower I’d try to mash it up with the previous thing. Anyway, coffee next?
Eating more spuds in the Village. Eating more millets in the village.
Australian National Herbarium gets a Facebook page.
The history of the Rockefeller Foundation’s agriculture work. That would include the Green Revolution.
Really confused Telegraph piece on heirloom and/or organic apples.
I guess I missed National Rum Day. But I’m nevertheless glad that it exists.

Another soldier, this time a Brit, “Rebuilding Afghanistan through agriculture … as part of a counter-narcotics cell that encouraged farmers to grow legal agricultural crops, such as wheat, instead of illegal opium poppies”.
Wild wheats and barley responded better to higher CO2, and that’s why they were domesticated.
Climate change is also changing one of my favourite apples — for the worse.
Kew reviews map app. No idea where our mapping expert is.

Quick catch-up after 10 days away edition. If I missed anything spectacularly important, it’s bound to resurface.

A baobab (not the baobab) in danger of extinction.
Could it be saved by attending a course on Contemporary Approaches to Genetic Resources Conservation and Use?
And if it’s courses you’re interested in, we have:

Agriculture nutrition linkages, also from Wageningen.
Agroecology – the Future of Farming?, from the College of Enlightened Agriculture at Schumacher College. Why the weaselly question-mark?
And a conference on domestication.

The value and use of social media as communication tool in the plant sciences deconstructed by AOBBlog.
AOBBlog also gives the “cunning culinarists” at Kew some stick on their 100 exotic edibles.
Personally, I’d quite like to try Dead Man’s Fingers.
And take a look at Kew’s new display of summer cereals.
I don’t see any mention, however, of lettuce as a sacred sex symbol, with added vocabulary-enhancing properties.
And speaking of manure, its use is almost as old as agriculture.
If I had a donut for every why-don’t-we-all-eat-insects article I’ve read, I’d be spectacularly overweight by now.
Big Picture Agriculture offers An Interview with Cornell’s Dr Erika Styger about the System of Crop Intensification (SRI-Rice).
Is watergrass (Echinochloa) a problem for SRI-Rice? I don’t know, but it supports Ford Denison’s argument about the speed of evolution in weeds …
… prompted by Carl Zimmer’s article on weeds in the New York Times.