- I love pictures of agrobiodiversity in markets.
- Humans did for trees on Rapa Nui after all, not rats.
- Like refining chocolate, extracting honey is a fragrant, messy process. Bring it on.
- Fair Trade coffee unfair to farmers, CIAT says.
- Another day, another genome. This time it’s cowpea.
- 2000 year old food forest in Morocco. Honestly! And guess what? It’s not thriving.
- Another video (long). Education of an Urban Farmer.
- Education of an ex-pastoralist farmer, Karamojong, Kenya
Nibbles: Livestock photos, Rice, Beer, Oca, Potatoes, Beer, Fermentation, Aquaculture, Chinese food, Citrus
- ILRI images are online.
- Rice farmers in Lao get an airing on Public Radio International.
- Tonto: expanding head banana beer.
- Rhizowen’s ongoing oca saga.
- “Intellectual property vital for agricultural innovation.” Er .. riiiiiiight.
- Instead of whinging, as we would, Laurent subverts the Blogger Bioblitz by including potatoes.
- The British National Hop Collection comes in useful. Hey, you had me at hops.
- Make better kimchi and the world will beat a path to your door.
- How many species of aquatic animals do you think farmers use in SE Asia?
- Labeling caviar.
- China’s food culture on the move.
- California’s oranges in big trouble.
Unintended consequences of cacao breeding
I’ll be in Ecuador later this week, but alas nowhere near “the upriver area of the Guayas River Basin in the lowlands of southwestern Ecuador”. If I were, you know that I would be investigating arriba chocolate and beans with all the assets at my disposal. Instead I’m relying on a post at a very interesting artisanal chocolate blog, Destination Ecuador. ((Incidentally, one of the most visually challenging blogs I’ve seen in a long time; to see the text of links I have to ensure that the mouse is hovering inside the post, which turns the background grey, which makes the yellow text of the links almost visible, if I squint. Whatever their designer is using, I’ll have some.))
The problem seems to be that the Nacional bean — source of arriba chocolate — is susceptible to witches broom, and is being replaced by a variety called CCN-51, and “while a very good quality chocolate can be made from CCN-51, it requires different fermentation and post-harvest treatment from Nacional beans”. It also tastes different. Currently, however, there’s absolutely no incentive for growers or buyers to separate CCN-51 from Nacional. Arriba carries a price premium as chocolate, but the beans don’t, and as a result one could pay the premium for non-arriba chocolate. In other words, a rip-off.
The post is very informative about the forces that act on cacao biodiversity and marketing — and will make me look more carefully at any chocolate I do chance upon.
Many routes to stayfresh cassava
Luigi wondered whether there was a connection between my recent report of a cassava that did not show post-harvest physiological degradation (PPD, or rotting for the rest of us) and his own post on the same subject in March of this year. So we asked the CIAT blogger.
So what’s the story? Did the high carotene trait come from M. walkerae? Or some other place? It would be great if you could tie these loose ends up for us.
And he did, by asking the CIAT researcher.
There is a connection as Luigi suggests. In the article we have just submitted there are four different sources of tolerance to PPD:
1) High carotenes
2) Induced mutations
3) Tolerance from a wild relative (Manihot walkerae)
4) Waxy starch genotypes.
The tolerance from high carotene clones is not coming from M. walkerae. It is an entirely different source and an entirely new chemical basis for the tolerance as well. As it turns out the tolerance from M. walkerae (which is real and is there) is not as good as the one we have seen in yellow rooted cassava.
Thanks to Neil, and to Hernán, and to Luigi’s elephantine memory. We’ll be on the lookout for that paper.
Nibbles: Columbian coffee, tomatoes, rice art, Kenya
- Colombian coffee growers on the run from climate change. Say it isn’t so, Joe.
- Man picks heirloom tomatoes, lives to tell the tale.
- Greenpeace jumps on the rice art bandwagon.
- Solving Kenya’s Food Crisis, One Indigenous Crop at a Time.