- Mini-cows: Cheaper by the pound, but more expensive by the head.
- Lebanese icon imperilled.
- Birds protect coffee from coffee berry borer.
- Cows (m)aligned. Via.
- Jessica discovers millet and a grain bank (food, not seed).
- A new disease threatens citrus in Florida. Yay!
News from the road
Apologies for the light blogging lately, but both Jeremy and I are on the road and busy with other stuff. When last seen, Jeremy was on vacation in Maine, dealing what will probably be the mortal blow to its lobster population. And I’ve been in and out of meetings all week, but I’ve got a couple of days off now and may have time to catch up on the old feed reader.
This is a good place to do that. I’m visiting the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica. They have a very pleasant campus in a spectacular area with a well-developed ecotourism industry:
CATIE has a botanic garden and an active seedbank for forest species. But it also has an interest in agrobiodiversity conservation, with very important field genebanks of cacao, coffee and peach palm, and a crop seed genebank specializing in local vegetables, maize and beans. More later.
Tules to the rescue
Not particularly inspiring at first glance, but then I googled “tule,” a word I hand’t come across before. I figured cattails would be some kind of Thypha. Tules turn out to be types of sedges, although some people seem to use the words interchangeably, or indeed together. Anyway, tules have an interesting ethnobotany in the American Southwest, along with other geophytes.
Nibbles: Dog genetics, ITPGRFA, Mapping, Neolithic, Insects, Markers, Soybeans, Milk
- Man’s best friend helps out again.
- Intellectual Property Watch looks at the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. And they found that it was good. Well, kinda.
- More on predicting the results of climate change on species distributions.
- A nice summary of what agriculture has meant for human genetics. I vote we go back to hunting and gathering.
- New insectarium allows you to eat exhibits. Pass the mopane worms.
- New DNA chip picks out best cows. Daisy unavailable for comment.
- The world’s greatest soybean farmer speaks. Did they serve tofu snacks?
- Had milk?
Pundit in the Punjab
On the Front Lines of the Global Food Crisis is the title of what promises to be a great series of posts over at Slate. I nibbled an earlier one a couple of days back, but I think this deserves more attention. The pieces are by Mira Kamdar, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World. She’s touring India, and the third and latest in her despatches from the front lines is from Ludhiana in the Punjab:
If a single institution can take credit for bringing the Green Revolution to Punjab, it is Punjab Agricultural University.