- Chocolate made from camel milk for the first time. And last?
- “Slow rusting” genes from Ethiopian wheat landraces.
- Brits (and Yanks, for that matter) look for ancient trees in woodlands becoming ever less distinctive.
- The world needs GM rice, but alas “the environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good as it should be.” Meanwhile, IRRI keeps hammering away at drought tolerance and resistance to other assorted stresses. It’s hard being rice.
- ICAR looks at the likely effects of climate change on crops and what can be done about it.
- Climate change making Soay sheep (and, incidentally, European fish too) not just smaller, also darker. Speaking of fish, there’s trouble in the Zambezi too, but not necessarily due to climate change. Although…
- A Greek seed bazaar.
- FAO turns to barn owls to stop Laotian rodent plague.
- US food policy destinations on Google Maps.
- Vermicomposting is good news for the Indian textile industry. Vermicomposting: I like saying that word.
Nibbles: India, City chicks, Rooftop gardens, Black cherry, Prairie grasses, Oryza SNP
- ICRISAT recommends diversity to cope with climate change in India.
- US urban farmers “mad as wet hens“. City chicks?
- US urban farmers with a view to die for.
- CWR becomes nuisance when free of soil pathogen.
- Convicts help with germplasm regeneration and multiplication.
- The “gold-standard set of curated polymorphisms” for rice.
Nibbles: New Agriculturist, Coffee
- New Agriculturist is out. Among many cool things, check out the piece on crossing rice with a wild relative to make it perennial.
- Nestle finds 33 elite coffee trees in Indonesia, evaluates 6, will use these to produce seedlings by somatic embryogenesis. What could possibly go wrong?
Livestock genetics symposium online
DAD-Net informs us that the presentations given at the symposium on Statistical Genetics of Livestock for the Post-Genomic Era, held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, on May 4-6, 2009, are now available online in the form of both PDFs and videos. Quite a resource.
Nibbles: Kerr reports, Monsanto shares, Thailand patents
- Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture mourns loss of agricultural biodiversity, issues report.
- Monsanto “shares with farmers the science behind the technology.” Nice of them.
- Thailand patents (transgenic) jasmine rice to “keep foreigners out of our paddy fields.” So much to say about this, so little time.