- Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
- Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
- More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
- More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
- Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
- Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
- Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
- Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
- Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
- Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?
Diversity and adversity in Yunnan, China
It can be a bit frustrating banging on about the importance of agricultural biodiversity when almost everybody else seems to be focused on simplistic solutions to complex problems. Frustrating, and tiring. So I’ll just point you to two items you can read for yourself and decide whether we are truly nuts. First, Nature’s report from Yunnan in China about the drought there. Secondly, a paper by Professor Yy Zhu and his colleagues, Crop Diversity for Yield Increase. Anyone should be able to join the dots.
Nibbles: Superweeds, Tree-planting, Cacao, Climate change
- Those pesky superweeds: a scientist says I told you so.
- And she’s not the only one. It’s not the process, people, its the product.
- Money grows trees. Apply now. Deadline 30 June.
- Caribbean urged to move up the cocoa value chain.
- Andy Jarvis speaks truth to power, in Spanish! h/t CIAT blog.
Nibbles: Mapping islands, Palm diversity, Niche models
- A Global Island Database for all you GIS geeks.
- African palms threatened by climate change: sensitive to climate, but constrained in their movement.
- But careful, it is easy to overestimate extinction risk when playing around with climate suitability models.
Nibbles: Conservation, Women, Subsidies, Bees, Microbes, Rhizobia, Genebanks, Chicken history, Nordic genebank
- Academics say conservation of biodiversity does not benefit the poor. Maybe they’re talking about the wrong kind of biodiversity?
- Innovation of the Week: Feeding Communities by Focusing on Women. I think my irony detector may be on the fritz.
- All you ever wanted to know about farm subsidies in the US. h/t Food Politics.
- The Bittersweet Dreams of Uruguay’s Beekeepers. Sad.
- State microbes! Really fun, and informative. Any better ideas?
- More microbes: The evolution of nitrogen fixation. Absolutely fascinating.
- Slideshow on genebanks in southern Africa.
- Pre-Columbian, Polynesian chickens in Chile not Polynesian and probably not pre-Columbian. Blast! Why must fun theories always run up against the brick wall of facts?
- NordGen’s annual report: crops, forests, livestock.