- You say potatoes, I say tomatoes; either way, the blight gonna get them. LATER: Ok, there was a second link to Rodale.com from “tomatoes”, but that seems to have disappeared, and here’s the story on that, thanks to Jesse.
- A huge haul of links to current articles about the drought in the US, and much else besides.
- And a smattering of ideas that farmers could adopt to improve production and conservation, in the US and perhaps elsewhere too.
- Speaking of which, goodish – or not-so-bad – news on food prices.
- Longhorn cattle: a selection of good-looking pictures. ILRI to flood Flickr with African longhorns?
- Good-looking beans find favour with Ugandan farmers.
- UK curry eaters looking forward to climate change, the fools.
Nibbles: C4 rice breeding, Tomato genes, Fruit/nut wild relatives, Peruvian cuisine
- C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
- Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
- I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
- There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.
Nibbles: Agroforestry award, Medieval agrobiodiversity, Agricultural R&D, Fermentation, Climate-smart agriculture, Drought, Aleurites moluccana, Language erosion, Sri Lanka, Livestock, Peas
- My friend Zac bags a well-deserved award.
- Agricultural diversity in the Middle Ages: squirrels and cotton. And there’s probably more where those came from…
- Keeping score on agricultural research spending.
- Fermentables interview.
- What does this climate-smart agriculture look like anyway?
- And do they ever need it in the American midwest.
- And what in blazes is candlenut?
- A tool for documenting endangered languages. Maybe endangered landraces or crops one day too…
- Documented: One Sri Lankan farmer’s thoughts on sustainable agriculture.
- Not to mention the plusses and minuses of livestock — straight from the horse’s mouth.
- And the myth that will not die: King Tut’s peas alive and thriving. Kudos to Jackson Holtz, a properly skeptical reporter.
Nibbles: Fork, Prairies, Cynodon, Clove, Impact, Amazon, Blog, Horse, Thyme, Mauritius, Dyes
- Slate puts a fork in, well, the fork.
- Gotta love the Prairies.
- Mysterious Cattle Deaths Caused by GMO Grass: not GMO, not particularly mysterious.
- Gotta love the Spice Islands.
- How scientists can extract impact from their
navel-gazingresearch. - Gotta love online mapping platforms.
- Another journal starts a blog.
- Horses in agriculture, and history.
- Gotta love za’tar. It’s about thyme.
- Sweeter than sugar. Mauritius goes for fair trade and diversification.
- Dying for batik.
Brainfood: Synthetic wheat, Pisum, Maize products, Seed predation, Cajanus, Tripsacum, Horse domestication, Cicer genomics, Cereal vulnerability, Allotments, Conservation units, Chilie diversity, Endophytes
- Sources of resistance in primary synthetic hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to insect pests: Hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid and Sunn pest in the fertile crescent. Domestication do-over continues to show promise. Closest thing to a jetpack?
- Evaluation of seed yield and seed yield components in red–yellow (Pisum fulvum) and Ethiopian (Pisum abyssinicum) peas. Weird pea species show promise in Serbia, of all places.
- Consumer preferences for maize products in urban Kenya. Most still like it white. Not much promise there.
- Bush pig (Potamochoerus porcus) seed predation of bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis) and other plant species in Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s pretty unpromising for seeds, especially right under the tree.
- Phenotypic diversity in Cajanus species and identification of promising sources for agronomic traits and seed protein content. 14 accessions of 8 seem promising (out of a total of 198 accessions of 18 species from the ICRISAT collection).
- Genetic relations among Tripsacum species revealed by genomic variation. They might be promising.
- Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Wild Equus ferus moves out of eastern Eurasian steppe 160 kya, shows promise, gets domesticated in the western part, but continues to introgress with local wild horses as it moves out from there.
- Large-scale development of cost-effective SNP marker assays for diversity assessment and genetic mapping in chickpea and comparative mapping in legumes. What can I tell you. It’s large-scale. It’s cost effective. It’s promising. I’m still waiting for my jetpack.
- The socioeconomics of food crop production and climate change vulnerability: a global scale quantitative analysis of how grain crops are sensitive to drought. It’s the middle income countries that are especially vulnerable, and thus where all that promise needs to come good.
- Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from contemporary British allotments. Please promise to keep open-pollinated heirlooms out of the marketplace.
- Harnessing genomics for delineating conservation units. But you need to combine information from neutral and adaptive markers in fancy ways to fulfill the promise.
- Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency. It’s all about how much water is available.
- Endophytic Insect-Parasitic Fungi Translocate Nitrogen Directly from Insects to Plants. Suppose we better promise to conserve these things too then. And here’s the slightly longer short version.