- China’s role in food price spikes. Books sounds worth reading.
- Dutch chefs easily fascinated. Just show ’em an Andean root or tuber.
- Much more on that pig domestication story.
- Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases agrees its agenda. In New Zealand. Jeremy avoids snarky remark.
- New York Times debates locavorism. Someone has to.
- Monsanto, DuPont Race to Win $2.7 Billion Drought-Corn Market. Africa says Yay!
- If you have an horticultural development project, Horticultural CRSP and GlobalHort want to hear from you.
- More environmental awards handed out. Recipients asked to blog.
- Chestnuts out of fire?
- Data!
- Really, who’d be a farmer?
- Chinese clone woollier cashmere goats. Why not just clone the wool directly, cut out the middleman?
- Tales of maize and tomato hybrids.
Nibbles: Quasi conservation, Prioritization, Nabhan, Wild sunflower in Argentina, Pests and diseases, Ethiopian honey, African beer, Ash, Camel milk, Livestock conference, Bull breeding, Goldman Environmental Prize, Anastasia
- Another nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism in conservation? Yeah, right. Oooooh, here’s another. What next? Conservation-vs-use to bite the dust?
- Now here’s a thing. Priority setting in conservation for plants in Turkey and sheep in Ethiopia. Compare and contrast.
- “Bad-ass eco warrior” quoted on … apples.
- Invasive species can be good … when they are sunflower wild relatives.
- Pests and diseases: “New solutions could include novel resistant cultivars with multiple resistance genes, suitable epigenetic imprints and improved defence responses that are induced by attack.” I’ll get right on that. And more from Food Security.
- Rare Ethiopian honey becoming rarer.
- Also rare are micro-breweries in Africa. Alas.
- Volcano bad for British diet. And Kenyan jobs.
- So let them drink camel milk!
- Conference on Sustainable Animal Production in the Tropics. Doesn’t sound like much fun? It’s in Guadeloupe!
- And, there will probably be photographs of bulls of “stunning scrotal circumference.” Convinced yet?
- “Rios won for his work promoting a return to more traditional farming techniques focusing on seed diversity, crop rotation and the use of organic pest control and fertilizers to both increase crops and improve the communist-led island’s environment.”
- Our friend Anastasia does Seed Magazine: “Until broader efforts to reduce poverty can take hold, crops with improved nutrients could be very important in reducing death and disease caused by nutrient deficiencies.”
Nibbles: Aubergines, Opuntia, Amazonian ag, Kenya, Swiflets, Coconut and Web 2.0, PROTA, Mexico, Fruit wild relatives
- More either-or stuff from the Guardian on the Indian GM brijal story.
- The USDA prickly pear cactus germplasm collection gets some exposure. And how many times can one say that.
- Much better title from Discover on that ancient northern Amazonian earthworks story.
- Kenyan foresters tell people to eat bamboo. Luigi’s mother-in-law politely demurs. On the other hand, she might like this.
- Swiflet farming? Swiflet farming.
- Really heated exchange on paper on coconut lethal yellowing in Yucatan develops on Google Groups. I love the internet.
- PROTA publishes expensive book on promising African plants. Promises, promises. NASA promised us the personal jetpack. Where are we with that?
- Nice summary of that Mesoamerican agricultural origins story we blogged briefly about a few days ago. So what exactly do you call hunter-gatherers who also grow crops?
- First International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops will be held March 19-23, 2011 in Davis, California on the campus of the University of California, Davis. Book early.
Nibbles: Peach genome, P, Marine protected areas
- Size isn’t everything, genome edition.
- Nutrient efficiency of agriculture, phosphorus edition.
- Win-wins, fisheries edition.
Battling it out over drought-tolerant maize in Africa
Maize in Africa is becoming a bit of a battlefield in the agri-culture wars. The BBC has a radio programme on the Water Efficient Maize for Africa project, which is a partnership between national programmes, CIMMYT and Monsanto, with a lot of work being done in Kenya. Predictably, it is very biotechnology-oriented, with marker-assisted selection and genetic modification to the fore.
At the other end of the spectrum, Scientific American has an article on a GEF project (funding comes also from Norway and the Netherlands) at Sakai, Kenya which is very different.
Agricultural extension officers now offer seasonal and locally relevant climate predictions explained in simple terms in Kikamba, the regional tribal language. They are now producing a handbook to translate weather predictions into practical advice about what and when to plant.
The project has also helped farmers set up a seed bank. A group of about 40 men will collect, process and preserve the best local seeds and loan them out again during the next planting season, slowly selecting for the best climate-adapted varieties.
Sakai’s farmers are hedging their bets. Increasingly, they are diversifying their crops by planting more drought-tolerant grains, peas and beans.
One wonders whether the two projects are even aware of each other, let alone talking. Maybe someone will tell us.