- Intriguing: how about a sliding scale for fertilizer taxes?
- Dubious: sustainable brewing in Bogota.
- Surprising: naked oat seeds in Canada.
- Challenging: new coloured potato varieties are nutritious and pest-resistant.
- Illuminating: white veggies are nutritious too.
- Important: EU seed vote coming up.
- Belated: CGIAR goes open access.
- Intoxicating: Japanese drink fermented hydrangea leaves.
- Obvious: Cars move grassland seeds.
- Freaky: interspecific grass hybrid for flood prevention.
- Tasty: Fine carnivorous dining in Bolivia.
- Metaphysical: granivory is murder.
- Political: UK government supports agroecology.
Nibbles: African food, Cattle grazing, Young farmers, Seed policy, Traditional medicine, Litchis, Land use, Perennial sorghum
- Today’s Nibbles is a Kenya edition. Just because.
- But we’ll start with an African foodie revolution that is passing that country by.
- Cattle need diverse foods too, so don’t neglect those forbs, Kenyans.
- A young Kenyan turns to vegetable growing. Not, alas, of the traditional kind. Yet.
- Well, he better get a move on, because it says here people are after his seeds.
- Seeds are what the traditional medicine industry could do with.
- I guess there’s always litchis.
- Wonder what they’ll do to land use patterns.
- But will there ever be perennial sorghum?
Nibbles: DIY plantains, Poppies, Fruit portions, EU seed law workshop, Sustainable intensification, Nutrition & ag, Traditional medicine, Soil maps, US biodiversity maps, Genomics & genebanks, Indian seed film, Food preservation
- Someone needs to tell the Los Angeles Times that plantains are not the “tropical cousin of the banana”.
- Someone else needs to tell “British and American agricultural advisers” that poppies are generally going to be a better bet than cotton in Helmland Province. Like they were in Ghazipur.
- Is there anyone who can tell schools not to serve whole fruit, when children prefer bite-sized pieces?
- And who will tell us what happens at the Workshop in the EU Seed Law, in Vienna today and tomorrow?
- In which we are once again told that sustainable intensification is the answer, but not how to do it.
- A tool for helping agricultural development types figure out what to do about nutrition.
- Let the Times of India tell you about how wild fruits and seeds are used in traditional medicine.
- ISRIC tells the world about its new soil maps of Africa.
- And the US government about its biodiversity, also in maps.
- Lots of people recently told their stories of how genomics is going to revolutionize genetic resources use to a meeting in ICRISAT, and now ICRISAT tells us.
- A new film tells the story of rice savers in India. Not, presumably, though, Bihar.
- Are you really telling me Genghis Khan was a food waste champion?
Nibbles: Vietnamese rice, Intensified rice, Photographed rice, No rice, Rice and beans, Ecosystem services
- Vietnamese rice varieties get sequenced. What will IRRI think?
- Well, they may be too busy cosying up to SRI to respond.
- A rice farmer does feature in a nice Christensen Fund slideshow.
- But no rice in these 12th century recipes.
- You know what goes well with rice? Beans, that’s what.
- And now, for something completely different: Ecosystem Service Valuation Toolkit.
Nibbles: Sesame, ABS, Symposium, Yield sensitivity, NUS Symposium proceedings, Food Fest, Typha pollen, Arepas
- Texan farmers have solved the problem of open sesame – with non-shattering varieties.
- They’re protected by patents, of course. No need then for handy dandy guidelines to access and benefit sharing in research projects.
- But you just know that ABS will be a hot topic when they round up the usual suspects for the International Symposium on Agrobiodiversity for Sustainable Development.
- As will the question of whether yields are becoming more or less sensitive to temperature.
- I wonder how quickly the proceedings of that shindig will become available. It took the 2nd International Symposium on Underutilised Species less than two years! Course, they’re still not open access …
- No free access to the IncrEdibles festival at Kew either. And why should there be?
- I’m willing to guarantee that cat-tail pollen will not be featured at Kew.
- Arepas, on the other hand…