- Do my eyes deceive me? Exhortation not to forget farms during biodiversity festivities.
- Edible Geography does Mexico City. Oh to be in DF on the 9th.
- What do Benin farmers want out of their chickens? Clue: it wont be easy.
- Is marama bean the next big thing? Probably not, but check it out anyway.
- New Biosphere Reserve protects wild coffee.
- Uber-blogger Tom Barnett tackles sweet potato breeding. Sweet potato wins.
Nibbles: Rust, Old rice, More old rice, Sticky rice, Mesoamerican balls, Prioritization, Legumes
- Rust boffins meet in St Petersburg. Good luck to them: sounds like they’ll need it.
- Did 3000-year-old rice really sprout in Vietnam? Nah.
- Indian farmers queue up for old rice seeds. Not old as in the Vietnam case above though.
- And more rice. Did the Chinese really use the sticky kind in mortar 1500 years ago? Yep.
- More ancient technology. This time Mayan rubber.
- “…a major leap forward in species-area relationship fitting…”: where will future habitat loss wreak the most havoc on plant species? And on crop wild relatives?
- The pulses of Africa. Well, a couple of them.
Nibbles: Mayan archaeobeerology, Pesticidal plants, Livestock and livelihoods, Uganda national park
- Cacao beer. What’s not to like?
- CABI blog deconstructs pesticidal plants.
- Worldwatch blog on how “livestock can improve food security and preserve and rebuild communities.”
- Bwindi Impenetrable National Park tries to diversify.
Nibbles: Hunter gatherers, Amaranthus and corn in Mexico, Protected areas and poverty, African ag, Pollan, Aquaculture in Laos, Range, Rainforest
- Pygmies forced to take up gardening, and they’re mad as hell about it.
- An amaranthus a day… And also from Mexico, saving maize from GMO nastiness. Oh, and the NYTimes does a number on maize domestication today to boot.
- Protected areas not so bad for people after all. But do they conserve biodiversity effectively? At least when community-managed, that is.
- African agriculture in theory and practice. Glib, I know. Get your own blog.
- Pollan does his usual shtick. But he does it well.
- You are subscribing to Danny’s nutrition thing, are you not? If you were, you’d know about the role of aquatic rice field species in rural Laotian diets.
- So how do you restore prairie? Expert opinion summarized and synthesized to within an inch of its life. But you can also hear from a range expert directly.
- Ok, so that’s grassland. If you wanted to restore a tropical rainforest you’d have to know about long-distance seed dispersal.
Nibbles: Sorghum and rice and climate change, Pacific agrobiodiversity today and yesterday, Japanese microbiota, Wolf domestication, Organic and fungi, Crop wild relatives, Bees, Hunger, Silk
- Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
- Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
- More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
- More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
- Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
- Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
- Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
- Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
- Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
- Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?