- Yams heading for trouble. What to do?
- Learn something from wild relatives, like they’re doing with tomatoes?
- Go for a totally new plant breeding paradigm?
- I know, let’s all go out and celebrate World Bamboo Day!
- Switzerland gives Laos US$6.3m in support of government’s agrobiodiversity initiative.
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation gives Growing Power US$5m in support of Growing Power’s urban agriculture efforts.
- National Geographic gives leaves a good going-over without mentioning agriculture.
- Farmers in Kerala give Navara red rice as a reason for good health and prosperity.
- World gives Monty Jones, rice breeder, high status.
- Paul Collier fan gives African governance the blame for low agricultural productivity.
Nibbles: Yams, Wild tomatoes, Plant breeding, Bamboo
- Yams heading for trouble. What to do?
- Learn something from wild relatives, like they’re doing with tomatoes?
- Go for a totally new plant breeding paradigm?
- I know, let’s all go out and celebrate World Bamboo Day!
Nibbles: Organic breeding, Agroforestry, Metallophytes, Fermentation, Grain storage
- Meta-analysis or no meta-analysis, breeders still want to breed for organic conditions.
- Farm Radio does tree farming.
- A plea for metallophytes. Every damn plant group has a lobby these days. I bet some of them are crop wild relatives though.
- As does almost every style of food preparation. Although I have to say I myself can never read enough about fermentation.
- This video is advertised as being about food preservation, and I was going to link it to the above, but it turns out to be about seed storage. Which is interesting enough, and important too, but not the same thing. A clever video, which I personally think doesn’t in the end make its point.
Nibbles: Irish Famine book, Breeding for adaptation, Neolithic diets, Randy Thaman, Ecological Babylon, IPR for smallholders, Botanical gardens
- Don’t underestimate the importance of a new book on the Irish Famine, despite the weird construction used in praising it.
- Impossible to overestimate the importance of crop breeding for climate change adaptation. And would you like a presentation with that?
- Cannot underestimate the diversity of early Neolithic diets. No, wait.
- Difficult to overestimate the contribution made by Prof. Randy Thaman to the conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Pacific. One of several honoured by IUCN for services to conservation.
- Fed up with linguistic tricks? Well, too bad, because here’s another one. It turns out you can use agricultural biodiversity terminology as examples to explain what’s wrong with ecology.
- Here we go again. Easy to underestimate the importance of IPR legislation in enabling smallholders to conserve agrobiodiversity.
- Plain impossible to list the x best botanical gardens in the world.
Support a plant breeder
One of the strangest crowdsourcing appeals I’ve ever seen landed in my in-tray this morning. Sarvari Research Trust, onlie begetters of Sarpo potatoes, are looking for £5000 in order to bring a new variety to market. And the reason they need the money is that the variety has to be certified and approved by the UK government before it is allowed on sale. That’s how most agricultural biodiversity is managed in the European Union; if a variety isn’t registered, which costs money, it can’t be marketed. To protect us, obviously.
The Sarvari Trust says:
We can’t get grant funding for this kind of work because is thought to be near market research and therefore a private matter. Breeders of GM resistant potatoes do get grant support!
Frankly, I think that’s over-egging the pudding a little. The cost of testing and registering a variety is always going to be a “near-market” issue, and I doubt breeders of GM potatoes get support for that aspect of their work. The real scandal is that the fixed costs of variety registration are a huge burden for a small breeder, and trivial for a large one. And farmers and gardeners who would like access to a greater range of agricultural biodiversity are denied choice as a result.