- “Kentucky rancher feeds candy to cows during drought.” Free markets.
- “Monoculture mania must and can be overcome.” Freedom of thought.
- “Agricultural development in emerging markets: virtual issue.” Free download.
- “If you grow corn or cabbages, the baboons steal them,” Khathazile said. Free enterprise.
Nibbles: Cassava Conference, Wikipedia
- Report on June’s Global Cassava Partnership conference available (behind a paywall, but you can email Glenn Hyman for a copy).
- Crops for the Future sings the praises of Wikipedia: “Instead of writing the umpteenth fact sheet on crop x, should we not consider improving the relevant Wikipedia article?”
Nibbles: Drought, Vegetable talks, Bees, Communications, Resilience, Fungi, Breadfruit tools, Taxonomy, Orphan crops, ICARDA
- The Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy (Emeritus) and Deputy Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University talks about the drought on his Iowa farm.
- While Ted offers 11 talks on the transformative power of vegetables.
- A new use for urban bees; protecting the lead on church roofs.
- “Agricultural researchers in developing countries are keen to communicate their research …” Scidev.net communicates.
- Growing a high-value crop instead of a staple is not resilience.
- Growing mushrooms in a laundry basket might well be.
- Growing breadfruit absolutely requires some simple processing tools if it is to be.
- Speaking of growth, Jeremy abuses his position of power to direct you to Eight Fallacies about Growth
- HarvestChoice grapples with the nomenklatura problem; which genius came up with SPAM?
- The Christian Science Monitor reports that orphan crops will be the saviour of African agriculture. Again.
- ABC (Oz) fears that war will destroy the ICARDA genebank, forgetting all about that Doomsday vault.
Nibbles: Bananas, Banana genome, Moringa, Hunger games, Deforestation, Digital herbarium, NTFP in Tanzania, CC in Tanzania, CC in Nepal, CC and Ceanothus, Potatoes, Fellowships, Fermentation
- No bananas without soil nutrients.
- Perhaps the back story to the banana genome can fix that.
- Coupla big Moringa meets coming up in November.
- Britain goes for gold in the jumping-on-the-Olympic-bandwagon-to-solve-global-hunger event.
- And CEO of Cargill offers coaching: be flexible, try harder.
- Deforestation in Guatemala and Belize. I love it when I can see geopolitics from space.
- Help Kew digitise its diversity.
- FarmAfrica celebrates non-timber forest products in Tanzania.
- Which could be of interest to Tanzanian farmers who have experienced the future of climate change.
- Nepali farmers say they’ve been hit hard by climate change.
- But it is not the reason for the climb of the desert ceanothus.
- Americans about to embrace colourful potatoes. Aren’t they always?
- The 2013 Vavilov-Frankel Fellowships are now open. Apply here.
- Seth Roberts says “I want to take this! Harvard class on fermented food.” Me too.
Nibbles: Drought, Olympic nutrition, GMO potatoes, Einkorn beer, Fast food, Coffee inputs
- More US drought data and some insights into the drought’s impact: it’s affecting the Black Sea region too.
- Another reason to improve childhood nutrition – it improves Olympic medal prospects.
- Grist gets stuck into the GMO potatoes debate. It’s about diversity, Dummie. Not that anyone cares.
- Brewing stone age beer. “The minor details make beer brewing exciting.” I’ll bet.
- The long, straight dope on a food industrialist’s approach to better fast food.
- Diversifying inputs increases Rwandan coffee farmers’ profits.