- Design guru talks botany. Latest plant getting the treatment is the Hawaiian Cotton Tree. Which, despite its name, really is a (remote) cotton wild relative.
- What has Next Generation Sequencing ever done for me? And what you should know about how it works.
- And here’s an example of it at work: different cultivated cotton species have behaved differently, genetically speaking.
- That used ancient DNA, this one didn’t, but I guess a future one on chiles might. LATER: Ooops, just realized this is old. So what was it doing in my RSS feed?
- Speaking of chiles, here’s a couple of more things on Native American agriculture.
- Free access to the first issue of volume 20 of Journal for Nature Conservation for the next 12 months.
- Rebuilding the genebank in Ivory Coast.
- Discovering the wonders of the coconut. Their headline, not mine.
- The latest news from the John Innes Centre’s genebank.
- Fancy a tulip? To eat, that is.
Nibbles: African seeds, African needs, Egyptian seed preservation, Archaeocandy, Conservation, Seed swap site, Water buffalo genome, Anti-striga films, Entomophagy, Black sigatoka, Pavlovsk, Cannabis genome
- Gates just gave AGRA $56 million to make new seed varieties available. PASS still not collecting the diversity it hopes to displace.
- Hang on though. Africa needs a “Green renaissance, not revolution”.
- Saving seeds the ancient Egyptian way.
- Eating sweets the ancient Papuan (and others) way.
- Odd to hear an agrobiodiversity dude talking about silver bullets – even with a question mark.
- SeedZoo site offers a space to give and to receive “traditional and indigenous food plants from around the world”.
- Today’s forthcoming genome of agricultural interest: water buffalo.
- Farmer to farmer films – gender sensitive, natch – “fight against striga”.
- Assessing the Potential of Insects as Food and Feed in assuring Food Security, from the FAO document repository.
- Much sound, less light, on black Sigatoka disease, from the BBC (natch).
- Vaviblog rounds up the latest skinny on Pavlovsk.
- And speaking of Vavilov, the latest genome to be sequenced has a VIR connection.
Nibbles: Feeding the world edition
- BBC says we can feed the world through technology. And why not. The Times of India, meanwhile, didn’t get the memo.
- Bill Gates at the IFAD Governing Council will probably say the same thing today. And put his money where his mouth is.
- CIMMYT Director General said the same recently at an Economist conference. Funny how genebanks are rarely among the saviour technologies being touted.
- It’s all about the scaling up, isn’t it?
- Tell that to the Lake Chad fisherfolk who are now turning to farming.
- And, in another universe, sushi seeks protection.
- Buffel vs Rhodes in the Arabian peninsula.
Nibbles: US Farm Bill, Polish chicks, Young Kenyan farmers, Jowar redux, Handwriting, Erna Bennett, Ant mutualism, Horizontal plastid movement, Horizon scanning
- Policy wonks start to worry about the next US Farm Bill and its effects on poor farmers elsewhere.
- Poles start to worry about their endangered chicks.
- The Youth in Agriculture gives agricultural biodiversity some love on St Valentine’s Day.
- “Can jowar ever replace rice?” Question expecting the answer no? (Jowar is sorghum.)
- Can anyone actually decipher what H.G. Wells wrote to FAO Director Lubin?
- A Memorial Service will be held for Erna Bennett, in English, at 12.30 hrs. on Friday, 9th March at Santa Balbina Church, Viale Guido Baccelli, Rome. It’s near FAO. And no, there’s no link.
- Ants help crop wild relative (among other things).
- Plastids move between crop and wild relative.
- Cambridge boffins look into crystal ball and see fully sequenced, N-fixing perennial cereals growing under sterile conditions. In deep ocean vents.
Nibbles: ICT, New institute, Brit apples, Coconut embryos, Farm cinema, Seeds, Southern obesity, Biofortification, Prize, Kew
- World Bank runs competition to develop climate change app. CCAFS surrenders.
- ICRISAT launches Center of Excellence on Climate Change Research for Plant Protection. CCAFS surrenders.
- Britain’s National Fruit Collection gets grafted.
- COGENT looks for validation.
- Everybody loves timelapse.
- A seed catalogue round-up.
- “True grits“. Worthy, of course, but basically I love the title.
- Not sure why news of a website for the Biofortification Conference held in November 2010 just popped up, but it did.
- Know any good, young, committed, practical, gung-ho, field-tempered, agricultural Norman Borlaug clones? The World Food Prize wants to hear from you.
- The Millennium Seed Bank has a blog. Welcome, seed-dudes!