- South Sudan crisis affecting its livestock too.
- Sugar, spice, and everything nice in Zanzibar.
- The secret to sustainable fisheries: recycling waste.
- Wheat going to be hit by heat.
- The history of growing food in Cape Town.
- More from the University of Reading’s cacao quarantine facility. With video goodness.
- You can get Austrian camel cheese at the Jaipur Literary Festival.
- Khan Academy does biodiversity.
Nibbles: Sake worries, Idaho apples, Local cuisine, SP leaves, Baobab superfood, CWR training, Physic gardens, Forest questions
- As if Japan doesn’t have enough to worry about, its sake is in trouble.
- Update on that Idaho Heritage Tree Project.
- Why local cuisine is best. Who needs fusion, eh?
- Sweet potato leaves are good, and good for you. But you can’t eat them if they’re not part of your local cuisine.
- Same goes for baobab.
- New Samara has report on crop wild relatives training in Uganda.
- A medicinal plant garden in Philadelphia.
- How can we improve agriculture to reduce the pressure in forested areas? One of the top 20 questions for forestry and landscapes, apparently.
Cup of cocoa brimmeth over
The International Cocoa Quarantine Centre at the University of Reading has been doing its business of providing disease-free cacao germplasm very quietly and unobtrusively, though no less effectively for that, since it took over from Kew in 1985. Funny, therefore, to see it splashed all over the headlines at the turn of the year. For example, the BBC trumpeted: “Facility opens to safeguard the future of chocolate.” What happened, of course, is that the ICQC just moved into a new, £1 million home at the university:
It consolidates the collection of 400 varieties into a single, improved greenhouse and should make the quarantine process faster, cheaper and greener.
Interestingly, I can find nothing on where the money came from, not even in The Economist, which you would have thought would have looked into it. In any case, great that funds were found to invest in such an important facility in support of cacao research and development. Some think that it would have made better financial sense to have it in a non-cacao producing country a bit closer to where the action is, but there are arguments on both sides.
Anyway, since we’re talking Theobroma, let me take the opportunity of pointing you to the brand new Instagram account of the Cocoa Research Centre at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, which is the source of much of the material at Reading. They’re also on Twitter.
Simran Sethi has been there a lot lately, and also has some cool pix.
Nibbles: American goats, Ancient dogs, Colorado sheep, Beer vs Wine, Vitis breeding, Southern cooking, Pennsylvania farming, Cherokee seeds
- A distinctly US flavour to Nibbles today, for some reason.
- A map of every goat in the US. Texas is the goat hotspot.
- Not there with dogs yet, but at least we now know when they arrived.
- How about sheep, though?
- Interestingly, there are more wineries than breweries in Texas.
- Saving the winegrape, molecule by molecule. Including in Texas?
- Saving Southern cooking, seed by seed. You remember that peanut thing from yesterday?
- But Pennsylvania cooking?
- How about Cherokee cooking?
Nibbles: R&D, Cheese double, Cali candied yams, Sustainable joe, Soy & deforestation, Cereals in Sudan, Big Ag, History of breeding
- ASTI says agricultural research investment in Africa is bearing fruit and needs to double.
- There’s a cheese revolution going on in America’s heartland.
- Meanwhile, the UK is worried about fake goat cheese.
- “Apparently, Californians like well-tanned sweetpotatoes.” Well of course they do.
- Good coffee AND conservation? I’ll take it.
- Soy AND conservation in Brazil? Well, not quite, but good news nonetheless.
- Cereal cultivation in Sudan pushed back several hundred years.
- What are the conditions for success in large-scale agricultural initiatives? You tell them.
- The history of crop improvement 101.