- 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.
Nibbles: Taxonomic search, Genebanks in China, USA, Nepal, Scaling up, Bison
- Discover taxonomic names in files, websites, etc…
- Chinese genebank collecting wild species in Tibet.
- Touring a non-government genebank. And running another one.
- Not a community one, though.
- Everybody talking about scaling up. Here’s how you do it. Probably need the media involved, right?
- Scaling up did for the bison.
Nibbles: Pollinator book, Museums, Quinoa and celiac disease, Plant growth analysis, Mangroves, Plant health
- You’ve heard of alternative lifestyles? Now read all about alternative pollinators.
- Why should we spend money digitizing natural history collections?
- Not all quinoa cultivars may be good for celiacs.
- The largest comparative growth experiment ever. Hope some of the 600+ species are crop wild relatives.
- Mangroves trap heavy metals. And sequester a lot of carbon. But they are moving. Thank goodness there’s lots of ways to value the services they provide.
- CABI’s Plantwise Knowledge Bank is online.
- Kew boffins blow up coffee. The genus, settle down.
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?