- Juliana Santilli guest-blogs on the book Agrobiodiversity and the Law over at Agrobiodiversity Grapevine.
- ICARDA tells communities how to set up a sheep breeding programme.
- While an Indian institute breeds pigs, with Canadian help.
- Another Indian institute does the same for mushrooms, with no help.
- And yet another sequences the coconut genome.
- While BGI sequences a whole bunch of CIAT cassava stuff. Only yesterday they were doing rice. Yeah, but only 50, and you gotta keep those sequencers going, don’t you? Would be nice to know how much the CGIAR is paying BGI annually. Do they get frequent flyer miles? Have they negotiated a corporate rate?
- A Kazakhstan apple tree grows on the East River. A forest, actually. If it had been in England, it might eventually feature here. Ok, ok, our quest for connections is occasionally overdone. Made you look, though.
- Ah, kimchi! Ah, fish empanadas! So much interesting food, only one stomach lining…
- Danny tells us about Ireland’s CWR database. In other news, Ireland has CWR. Oh, and then he goes crazy on the Biodiversity for Nutrition mailing list. Did he get his goat is what I want to know.
- AoB on in vitro peach palms. Why read the paper, when AoB abstracts the abstract?
- Bifurcated Carrots on seed saving in Canada. Video goodness galore.
- And while we’re talking cinema, here’s news of a movie on a year in the life of four Kenyan farmers.
- From Kenyan farmers to First Farmers. The Womb of Nations. I like that. And more. Agricultural hearths. I like that too.
- Four days of discussion about land tenure. May not be enough, actually.
- “…70 per cent of the peppermint sold in the US is descended from a mutant in a neutron-irradiated source.” Good to know.
- I missed International Mountains Day. Again.
- That EU-funded taro mega-project from a PNG perspective.
- What I like about this Worldwatch series on neglected plants is that they’re not factsheets. Yet.
Nibbles: Cannabis, Biochar, Hessian fly, Conference, Anti-conference, Mexican seeds
- Plant domain name changes hands for “high” price.
- Biochar reduces emissions of greenhouse gases from glacial soils. Probably cures dandruff too.
- We love resistance to wheat hessian fly, as an example of the value of agricultural biodiversity. Now it gets really interesting.
- 18th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference, University of Hull. h/t CAPRi Deadline for submissions is Thursday! Hurry!
- But wait! “‘Sustainable Development’ Is Often Used Gratuitously”.
- Local seed saving in Mexico.
Brainfood: Growth, Grasslands, Seaweed, Apple pedigrees, Marker assisted selection, Ants, Iron biofortification
- Economic growth and biodiversity. “There is no fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity.” Hmmmmn.
- Phytodiversity of temperate permanent grasslands: ecosystem services for agriculture and livestock management for diversity conservation. At heart, a plea for more interdisciplinary research.
- The Interaction between Seaweed Farming as an Alternative Occupation and Fisher Numbers in the Central Philippines. Alternative occupations don’t necessarily reduce over-harvesting.
- Genotyping of pedigreed apple breeding material with a genome-covering set of SSRs: trueness-to-type of cultivars and their parentages. Your papa aint your papa but your papa don’t know.
- The GCP molecular marker toolkit, an instrument for use in breeding food security crops. Marker-assisted selection is not yet used for Musa spp., coconut, lentils, millets, pigeonpea, sweet potato, and yam. For the other 12 crops, 214 molecular markers were found to be effectively used in association with 74 different traits.
- Ant diversity and bio-indicators in land management of lac insect agroecosystem in Southwestern China. When you’re managing for a wild insect, the wild species are secondary.
- Biofortification for combating ‘hidden hunger’ for iron. Swings and roundabouts apply, with a vengeance.
Nibbles: Brand new tool, Baseline, Orange cassava, Food non-crisis, ILRI on the frontline, WorldFish
In recognition of the fact that I’ve spent the past week at CIMMYT up to my ears in the CGIAR, an all-CGIAR edition!
- CCAFS unleashes hell. Well, Climate Analogues anyway. No, wait…
- How does CCAFS measure impact anayway? Well, by documenting progress in adaptation relative to a baseline, of course. What I want to know is how the baseline captures within-crop diversity.
- Meanwhile, HarvestPlus is having another impact of its own. Well, I guess we’ll really have to wait for the health studies to be sure, but anyway.
- And speaking of impact, IFPRI now says that surveys show that the food crisis was not really a crisis for the poor, where simulations say it was. Now what?
- ILRI remembers the visit of Angela Merkel, and, probably unrelatedly, discovers the joys of fermentation.
- WorldFish got a brand new website. Does Climate Analogues work for fish?
Talking about FIGS
We’ve blogged here once or twice before about Focused Identification of Germplasm (FIGS). This is a GIS-based strategy pioneered at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas for choosing genebank accessions based on where they were collected, which in many cases seems to yields a significantly improved chance of landing the trait you want. Well, a new paper is out applying the method successfully to wheat stem rust resistance. But a press release on the ICARDA blog also tells us that “the FIGS team is now launching an international consultation to help spread this practice among the global scientific community, and to learn together to further improve the FIGS tool.” If you want to join in, contact Ken Street (k.street AT cgiar.org) at ICARDA.