- High-protein, vitamin-A enriched cassava. It’s GM, but it doesn’t have to be. Apparently.
- Resilience Science shows us the modernist face of intense and diverse agriculture in Brazil.
- The Scientist Gardener gives taro, and our pal the TaroMeister, some respect.
- A tobacco festival! Celebrating the diversity of cigars! In Cuba! (Where else?)
Nibbles: Lingonberries, Genebank Standards, Genebank, Seed Systems, Chinese drought, Cuba, Mexican bees
- Lingonberries power a trip from moose to mousse, and mush.
- FAO has a draft of updated genebank standards!
- Climate change person visits ICRISAT genebank, is impressed.
- Access to improved seed lauded.
- Yo! Price spike watchers! The Chinese drought thing is complex. Pay yer money. Take yer choice.
- Our friends at DAPA highlight their friends in Cuba: “peasant farmers have been able to boost food production via environmentally friendly methods”.
- Protecting native bee populations in Mexico.
Nibbles: Food prices, Wheat breeding, Potato Park, Mead, Peanut processing
- Is the World Producing Enough Food? The NY Times has the answer(s).
- Aussies trying to get to grips with salinity through breeding. Very cool, but maybe they should just stop growing wheat and think of some other crop?
- Potato Park potatoes to be parked in the Bóveda Global de Semillas de Svalbard.
- You know what those naughty Vikings used to say: “Let there be mirth, mead and fornication!”
- Adding value to peanuts in Bolivia. KIT video.
The wildness on your sofa
The question of what is the difference between the domestic pig and a wild boar, or the distinction between a broiler chicken and a wild jungle fowl is very similar to the question of what is the difference between a human and a chimpanzee.
Well, maybe. But Evan Ratliff’s piece in National Geographic is an entertaining summary of those distinctions, and of the different possible ways in which they may have come about.
It also reminded me of a great quote from another, much older National Geographic article, which is actually quite relevant again now. ((Not that it was ever not relevant, if you see what I mean.)) Talking about using crop wild relatives, a breeder interviewed by the late Bob Rhoades for The World’s Food Supply at Risk in 1991 says this:
It’s a bit like crossing a house cat with a wildcat. You don’t automatically get a big docile pussycat. What you get is a lot of wildness that you probably don’ t want lying on your sofa.
Bibbles: Nutrition conference, Arabidopsis tinkering, Grape evolution
- The Leveraging Agriculture: what engaged participants? And the IFPRI contribution. What’s the intersection of those two sets, I wonder.
- Productive means susceptible. Except when it doesn’t. I’m in that kind of mood today.
- The deep origins of Vitis.