- The Global Fossil Record. Visualized. Not agricultural, but couldn’t resist it.
- Malnutrition? It’s the culture, stupid.
- Check out the world’s largest chickpea drought trial.
- Overfishing the Amazon.
- Ah, so that’s how wheat did it!
- Food aid can support sustainable livelihoods too.
- Soon, most crop production will go to feed China’s pigs. And you’ll be able to follow that on FAOStat’s interactive thingie on agricultural tradeflows.
- But it can’t possibly be good for sustainable diets, can it?
- New book on fermentation. Never enough of those.
Nibbles: Bamboo, Green Wall, Rubber, Cacao, Quinoa
- Fancy a bamboo tour of China? Maybe these guys from Alabama will go.
- You can build with it, of course.
- Even help build a wall, perhaps.
- Rubber won’t be much good for that, I guess. But it has its uses.
- Always has.
- And then there’s cacao.
- Sustainable, of course.
- With all that that entails with regard to land rights, for example.
- And let’s stop saying that all these things poor people grow are somehow bad for them, shall we?
Nibbles: BBC series, Pacific breadfruit & yams, Sustainable diets, Cuba atlas, MSB standards, Biofortification on radio, German food scandals, Mexican foods, Non-PC food, CWR interviews, Old Irish sources, ITPGRFA funding, Crop Trust presentations, ISHS, Neural crest and domestication, Wheat genome
- That BBC mega-doc on botany just started.
- PGR News from the Pacific: breadfruit and yams. My former colleagues keeping busy.
- How sustainable is your diet? Here comes the data.
- Cool historical atlas of Cuba has some agricultural stuff.
- The Millennium Seed Bank’s Seed Conservation Standards, final draft.
- Kojo Nnamdi Show on biofortification.
- German sausage and beer industries hit by scandal. What the hell will Luigi survive on?
- Maize beer, maybe. And amaranth.
- Thankfully neither of which have objectionable names.
- Nigel Maxted of University of Birmingham on crop wild relatives.
- His mate and mine Ehsan Dulloo of Bioversity, on the same thing.
- Ancient Irish apples, both wild and cultivated.
- Seed Treaty is short of funds, but they are working on it.
- The Crop Trust is on Slideshare!
- Banana symposium coming up in August.
- A theory of mammal domestication.
- First stab at the bread wheat genome. A tour de force.
Nibbles: Coffee processing, British liquorice, Livestock maps, Chicken semen, Global Nutrition Report, Plant booze, Cuban urban ag, Forests & nutrition, Sustainable cacao, Climate-smart ag, Modelling landuse, Mapuche up in arms, Rothamstead experiment
- Touring the world’s coffee processors.
- Liquorice next? Starting in the UK?
- India has 30% of the world’s cattle. Which you might not be able to guess from these very cool ILRI maps. Including one on chickens, in which the Nordic countries feature perhaps less than they should.
- The Global Nutrition Report will have these indicators at country level. Some stuff there on fruit and vegetable consumption, but why nothing specifically on dietary diversity? Anyway, if you’d like to make suggestions, you can.
- Wait, why is there nothing on alcohol consumption? And is diversity in alcohol-producing plants a good thing? I mean, nutrition-wise.
- Uhm, nothing on urban agriculture either. I bet you that’s an indicator of something or other, nutrition-wise.
- Maybe Amy Ickowitz of CIFOR will suggest some indicators. She has interesting data on forest cover and child nutrition.
- How to make cacao cultivation more sustainable.
- Andy Jarvis on how to scale up climate-smart agriculture without necessarily sacrificing goats. Nor, presumably, nutrition.
- Model says environment can support subsistence hunting and agriculture only up to a point, and no more. Still no cure for cancer. But did someone tell the Mapuche?
- Well, what do you know, genes come, and genes go.
Brainfood: Landscape preferences, Livestock selection, Romanian conservation, Nordic Horseradish, Social structuring, Darjeeling tea, ZFarming, Pineywoods cattle, Cotton breeding, Neglected veggies
- Public preferences for ecosystem-enhancing elements in agricultural landscapes in the Swiss lowlands. People don’t like complex agricultural landscapes as much as they should. Well, in photos anyway.
- Some traditional livestock selection criteria as practiced by several indigenous communities of Southern Ethiopia. The selection methods of elders are based on characters that correlate with production and reproduction efficiency. Now there’s a shocker.
- Needs and gaps in the conservation of wild plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in Romania. 4 out of 300 useful wild species may need better protection. Sounds like a pretty good score to me.
- Genetic diversity in Nordic horseradish, Armoracia rusticana, as revealed by AFLP markers. Each Nordic country has pretty much its own.
- How social organization shapes crop diversity: an ecological anthropology approach among Tharaka farmers of Mount Kenya. Diversity of crops and of sorghum landraces is structured socially, with neighbourhood groups being an important organizing principle.
- The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations. GI has worked because marketing has convinced people that industrial plantations are also idyllic gardens, but the workers know better.
- Urban agriculture of the future: an overview of sustainability aspects of food production in and on buildings. You need to work at it.
- Long in the Horn: An Agricultural Anthropology of Livestock Improvement. “Livestock as landscape” in the southern US.
- Usefulness and Utilization of Indian Cotton Germplasm. Need to try chemical and physical mutagenesis as well as bring in new diversity from abroad. Do I detect a slight whiff of desperation?
- Potential and biodiversity conservation strategies of underutilized or indigenous vegetables in Himahal Pradesh. Improve provision of planting materials, management practices, harvesting methods, post-harvest , marketability, nutritional status and policies and legal frameworks. Really? Is that all? I suspect anyone into NUS could have told you that before you even went into the field.