- Coconut beetle attack in Cambodia.
- Indian Green Revolutionary goes organic.
- Forests leave fingerprint in wine.
- School gardening in Ghana, farmer field school for women and children in Panama.
- WWF launches podcast series “The Wild Things.” Bioversity to counter with “The Cultivated Things.”
- Oldest pottery found in Chinese cave with oldest rice.
- The transition to agriculture “was entered into slowly and reluctantly.” Evidence from the Netherlands, of all places.
- Got an apple orchard? Wanna be a star?
- Hunting down The Fruit Hunters.
2009 BIO International Convention has a blog
AgBiotech@Bio is brought to you by the Council for Biotechnology Information and is focused specifically on agricultural biotechnology news and information for the 2009 BIO International Convention in Atlanta, Georgia.
Day 1 (18 May) was all about sustainability.
Diversity on air
I’ve been listening to a radio programme about diversity in action. Called The Evolution Boomerang, from Soundprint, it examines three cases where diversity is important to agriculture and the environment. There’s a segment on GMO cotton and insect resistance, a segment on the need for genetic diversity at salmon hatcheries, and a segment on selecting bacteria to degrade a chemical that had never existed on Earth before humans manufactured it.
All good stuff, if you have half an hour to spare. You will need Real Player to listen.
Nibbles: Asparagus, Eels, ICT, Dingoes, Phoenix dactylifera, Apples, Bear-pit
- Liguria’s asparago violetto gets Slow Food treatment.
- “The bottom line is we just don’t know why they are struggling so badly.”
- Using mobile phones to treat plant pests and diseases in Uganda.
- Dingoes have positive effect on biodiversity.
- Date palm genome mapped.
- Boffins see the light, explain negative effect of fertilizers on biodiversity.
- Brogdale situation “better,” but for how long?
- Wait, Bern has a bear-pit?
Nibbles: Peppers, Medicinals, NYC gardening, Science writing, Urban ag, Pouteria
- Hot chili peppers on a blistering night, dust on my face and my cape…
- “North America’s only medicinal herbs germplasm collection.” New one on me.
- “Brooklyn was a breadbasket for the city only until the middle of the nineteenth century.” New one on me.
- Different journalistic takes on cow genome.
- Edmonton learns from Havana.
- Lucuma no longer novel, can enter Europe.