- An interview with the legendary Melaku Worede.
- Rwanda has to go from 100 to 30,000 ha of bananas, apparently.
- Coconut water good for athletes. And the rest of us too, actually.
- Gates Foundation launches a “community page.”
- Bolivians going back to their food roots.
- “…better integration of health and agricultural interventions and policy” needed. Seconded.
- “[A] graphical accounting of the limits to what one planet can provide.” Groovy climate change stuff.
- And if that left you gasping for more, here’s “Socioeconomic consequences of climate change in Sub-equatorial Africa related to the agricultural sector”.
- “Mediterranean” diet set for World Heritage Listing. Maybe. Spaniards, Greeks to object?
- Kenya’s macadamia crop threatened, but help is at hand. In other news, Kenya has a macadamia crop.
- Equilibrium goes Nuts.
Nibbles: Eggplant, Cactus domestication, Berries, Conservation, Drought, Conference, Chaffey, Rice relative, Cornus, Adansonia, Pavlovsk, Genebanks, Dams
- How can you do Eggplant’s Rich History and not wonder why this generally huge, generally purple thing is called an eggplant?
- Domestication of the Gray Ghost Organ Pipe cactus; exceedingly complex. Oh and there’s a cool photo here.
- How berries protect the brain from age-related malfunction. Are you listening, Dmitry?
- Protect medicinal plants, says letter-writer.
- The world doesn’t understand drought tolerance, says another letter-writer.
- Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica conference.
- Chaffey’s Plant Cuttings from Annals of Botany. Must-read stuff.
- A wild relative contributes trait for early morning flowering to rice, allowing it to escape sterility induced by high temperatures.
- The Cornelian Cherry and the Baobab explained.
- Voice of America devotes Special English report to Pavlovsk. If that ain’t viral, what is?
- Genebanks on a roll in China. In Australia, not so much.
- Dam dataset online. Let the mashups proliferate.
Nibbles: Oca etc, Diseases, Pigs, Dzud, Sex, Rice
- There’s a Facebook group for that: unusual root crops, sponsored by the inimitable Rhizowen.
- ILRI says herders are important to identify disease outbreaks in livestock. Makes sense to me.
- ILRI also says local breeds should be included in Indian pig-breeding programmes. Again, no argument.
- More on livestock: what Mongolia’s harsh winter has wrought. BTW, there’s also a discussion at DAD-Net of the effect of Pakistan’s floods on livestock.
- Aspen trees need occasional sex. Don’t we all.
- Climate change not good for rice. I knew that, I think.
Court decides against Pavlovsk but hope remains
We’ve just learned that the court has decided in favour of the federal housing authority to permit the destruction of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station’s field collection of fruit diversity. Some hope remains, however. The N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) says it will today lodge an appeal with the High Arbitration Court against the Supreme Arbitration Court’s decision. This gains campaigners another month to save Pavlovsk.
A spokesman for VIR also said that they had received further confirmation that the Court’s decision can be revoked by the President or Prime Minister.
We don’t know whether either Mr Medvedev or Mr Putin is actually listening, but if you haven’t already done so, it can’t hurt to let them know how you feel.
Nibbles: Greenhouse gases, Fellowship
- How to farm for greenhouse gas credits. There’s an online calculator (for the US)!
- Bioversity calls for applicants for the Vavilov-Frankel Fellowships 2011.