Climate change

Nibbles: Atlantic potatoes, Andean feasting, Lupin biodiversity, Vegetable grafting, Agrobiodiversity survey, Seed lending library, Lathyrus factsheet, Wild horses, School feeding

Tracing Canary Island potatoes back to the Andes.
Lupin diversity, all in one handy place.
Bangladeshi women are grafting away.
Wanna take a survey of “lessons learned about ways and means to conserve and use genetic diversity to build resilience to climate change in food and agriculture systems“? Uhm.
Maybe they should survey this guy.
Kew takes on the grasspea.
I have my freedom but I don’t have much time…
FAO spots a win-win-win in school feeding programme linked to family farms.

Another soldier, this time a Brit, “Rebuilding Afghanistan through agriculture … as part of a counter-narcotics cell that encouraged farmers to grow legal agricultural crops, such as wheat, instead of illegal opium poppies”.
Wild wheats and barley responded better to higher CO2, and that’s why they were domesticated.
Climate change is also changing one of my favourite apples — for the worse.
Kew reviews map app. No idea where our mapping expert is.

The Sustainable Development Solutions Initiative wants your comments on its report Solutions for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. You have till 15 August. h/t ILRI.
We can do you natural decaf, if you’re willing to risk losing the entire coffee crop to drought or insects.
Likewise, we can do you Turkish ice-cream, but you may have to do without some orchids in future.
I don’t suppose the January 2014 meeting on “Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in a Changing Climate” being organised by NordGen will be able to help, but it might.
I confess, I have found myself sipping a Negroamaro and wondering how it got that name.

Feed lots, from the ever-wonderful Nicola Twilley – is the first of our eye-openers.
Bifurcated carrots is hosting a PDF profile of Tom Wagner, prolific breeder of tomatoes and potatoes.
Katherine McDonald is keen on a farming simulator game. Games? Who has time? Maybe this weekend.
1969 maps of cereals in India. I’d love to see them updated. A project for …
… Jacob van Etten. He and Emile Frison say that “Harnessing Diversity by Connecting People is the Key to Climate Adaptation in Agriculture”.
On Dr Frison’s last day as DG of Bioversity International. So, farewell then …
… the banana. Pat Heslop-Harrison consulted by BBC’s The Food Programme. Here’s his take on Bananas and their future.
Cornell University is offering an online course in permaculture design.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the city planners in Los Angeles decriminalized urban agriculture?
Grist gets to grips with the locks that imprison GMO research – real and imaginary.

The Lancet waxes optimistic on hunger and poverty goals.
Korea keen to help compile information on African livestock.
Is there nothing Jatropha cannot do? Now it’s a carbon sink.
Fijian ginger and Ethiopian beans; two value chains explored in the latest New Agriculturalist.
An International Symposium on Vegetables in August 2014, with lots of interest, but as it is under the ISHS you’ll have to pay to read about it.
“Temperature alters population dynamics of common plant pests.” Ya don’t say.
“Help a Bolivian farmer: Eat quinoa“. Now there’s a headline with attitude.