- That old perennial perennial grains featured in a new online magazine.
- @gr0b10d1v3r$1ty: Password to a More Secure Agriculture. See what Fabrice did there?
- Five games that will revolutionise your understanding of agricultural economics. No, really. We particularly like Bohnanza.
- The botanist in the kitchen looks at leeks; be ready for St David’s Day 2014.
- Most Ancient Romans Ate Like Animals. Prize for most obnoxious headline about NUS?
- Looking forward to BBC R4 on insectivory next week.
- Bangladesh encouraging agricultural diversification.
- A plague of locusts, just in time for Passover.
- Daily Kos does a big number on women in agriculture. Worth a bookmark.
- And Kew does a number on castor oil seeds. Breaking Bad fans will want to read it.
- We haven’t linked to a genome study for ages, so let’s hear it for bamboo.
- One of a whole lot of presentations from the recent Bio-innovate conference in Ethiopia, courtesy of ILRI.
Nibbles: Hunger meet, Collecting info, Mapping species, Fair trade, Irish Famine, Rice changes, Food podcast, Cow genomics
- Hidden hunger experts come out into the open.
- Bioversity germplasm collecting reports go online.
- Where the threatened species are.
- Fair trade, shmare trade.
- The Lumper makes a comeback.
- Rice innovation in Bangladesh, abandonment in Nepal.
- Cherfas smears himself in bog butter for new podcast.
- Genomics and the livestock industry.
Cassava accessories in Oxford
The latest In Our Time sent me scurrying to the online database of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Gotta love a museum whose collection you can search using the keyword “cassava accessory.” I also liked the historic photographs of the Luo, several of which include agricultural biodiversity.
Nibbles: Fruit hunters, Organic interview, Hunger review, Jamaican seeds, Project evaluation, Horse domestication, Maize then and now, Impact studies, Seed kits, Amazon ranching, Habitat restoration, Native potato manual, SRI
- CBC documentary on collectors of fruit diversity. Anyone seen it?
- Matthew Dillon of Seed Matters on organic seeds.
- IFAD bigwig deconstructs Conway’s One Billion Hungry. Great summary of 400+ pages. Diversified farming systems are in there, kinda sorta.
- Jamaican bill calls on someone or other to “maximize internal intra and inter-species variation to boost benefits.” They need to fix the title too. It has something to do with the ITPGRFA.
- How to evaluate fisheries and aquaculture projects. Nothing in there about the importance of genetic diversity in these systems, or indeed their possible effects on the biodiversity around them.
- Sculptures of horses with tack from middle of Saudi Arabian desert may push date of domestication way back.
- Maize a staple, not a ceremonial condiment, in early Peruvian coastal civilizations. And also in Timor Leste for that matter. One does worry about those local landraces, though.
- Latest examples of impact of investments in agricultural R&D from EIARD. Includes African indigenous veggies!
- AVRDC sends vegetable seed kits to Mali. Including indigenous species, but apparently only improved varieties.
- Anthropologist goes to Amazon, learns not to look down his nose at ranchers.
- Millennium Seed Bank helping to restore Falkland habitats. That sort of thing can be a business, you know?
- Manual for the conservation and improvement of Chiloe’s native potatoes. Should have something similar for maize in Timor, eh? And African indigenous veggies too?
- You remember yesterday’s Nibble about SRI? Here’s more oil on the fire.
Nibbles: Svalbard, Wayne Smith, Salinity, Tasty sorghum, NUS conference, Med collecting, Income and diversity, Agricultural packages
- Canadian genebank sends seeds to Svalbard.
- And Plant Breeder of the Year goes to… Bet you he used the genebank a lot.
- Dubai told to grow local plants to save water. There’s a genebank for that.
- More digestible sorghum down to one gene. Probably came from a genebank.
- A conference on neglected and underutilized species. And the genebanks that conserve them?
- Collecting on Mediterranean islands for Kew’s genebank. Nice gig if you can get it.
- Richer farmers more likely to adopt improved varieties. To him that has… So I guess genebanks should go to the poorer farmers to collect landraces? Always wondered about that.
- Can I help it if everything came up genebanks today?
- Well, almost everything. Agricultural packages unwrapped by the Archaeobotanist.