- FAO’s Regional Aquaculture Information System (RAIS) website launched. Covers the Gulf states.
- Pinoy farmers urged to go organic.
- Climate change risk mapped in SE Asia. Cambodia surrenders.
- Local weed makes good in Mexico.
- The Prunus mume collection at the Beijing Botanic Garden.
New crops tapped by ARS
The USDA’s ARS is apparently optimistic about two new crops they’ve been looking at. Or not so new in one case. Guayule, or Parthenium argentatum, was actually used in pre-Columbian times for its latex. It could also now be a source of bioenergy. And milkweed seems to have a lot of weird uses.
Nibbles: Rescue, Biofuels, Striga, Dogs, Vegetable seed, Mulberry, Afghanistan, Aquaculture, Abaca
- Global Crop Diversity Trust “on track” to reinvigorate 100,000 varieties, “one of the largest and most successful biological rescue efforts ever undertaken”. Jeremy says: “Kariba Dam.”
- More reasons to go perennial. And native to boot.
- Farmers go crazy with Striga-resistant maize.
- Design-a-pooch just around the corner, thanks to genome sequencing. Well it was all worth it then, wasn’t it.
- AVRDC teaches Solomons farmers to save seeds, grandma to suck eggs.
- Mulberries cryopreserved. Yay! Now for that productivity.
- Turning grapes to raisins, swords to plowshares, in Afghanistan.
- District Fishery Officer (In-charge) tells of guy “farming in a floodplain adjacent to Coler Beel under the same upazila and earns a net profit of Taka 9 lakh after selling 80 metric tons of harvested fish from the Beel last year.”
- Abaca: quantity or quality?
Nibbles: Paan, Homegardens, Yams, Apiculture, Sorghum, Asparagus, Vicuna
- Paan unwrapped — betel leaf, areca nut.
- “We were suffering; we had no food to eat so we tried to make a garden.”
- IITA comes up with technique to propagate yams through vine cuttings using carbonized rice husks as growth medium. Worlds beats path to Ibadan.
- The Virgin Fresh Apicultural Project is cool, but needs a new name.
- Sorghum makes big move from wallboards to gas and booze.
- Great Witley sweeter than Peruvian. No, not weed, dude.
- The vicuna: use it or lose it. They did, so they didn’t.
Surfing for seaweed
I’ve been sick at home for the past few days with what the wife is pleased to refer to as a man-cold but I think is a middling form of bubonic plague: bad enough to keep me from getting out of bed, not bad enough to prevent me surfing the tubes. Anyway, it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time to follow links to your heart’s content. I won’t go into the details of how I got there, although it was actually rather fun, but anyway, for example, this evening I landed totally serendipitously, after quite a meander from something totally unrelated, on a website of genuine agrobiodiversity interest. It’s about Porphyra. This is a genus of red algae which is very important as food in Japan, where it is know as nori. The Japanese are big eaters of different sorts of seaweed. But Porphyra is the most widely consumed seaweed in the world, and is even farmed. I just had no idea that the stuff you wrap around sushi comes from one (ok, maybe two) particular species, and one so complicated to grow to boot. I wonder if it will all now go for biofuel.