- Unusual uses for a gourd.
- CIAT says North Africa will suffer most from climate change. So it must be true.
- Food Festival in the Khasi-Jaintia Hills of Mawphlang in India.
- Forget the global poor and their hidden hunger. We’re not eating our fruit and veg either.
- Evangelinemay1 wants to know how to “bring back biodiversity to our agricultural crops“. Let’s all love-bomb her, shall we?
- Radix has mauka seeds! (He means anthocarps of Mirabilis expansa.)
- ILRI continues to decrease agrobiodiversity — of animal diseases.
Nibbles: Maasai, Arbutus, Yak, China, USA
- ILRI video on helping herders with that climate change thing.
- Nutritional composition of Strawberry tree fruits.
- The genetic history of the yak.
- Chinese food archaeology: noodles and fruits.
- Colonial food in early America.
Nibbles: Ethnobotany, Marketing, Cacao
Nibbles: Fast cowpea, Conference, Rice, Schools
- Anastasia reports on the Biofortification conference: 60-day cowpeas
- Big blog post on even bigger conference on molecular tools for improving vegetatively-propagated crops: banana, plantain and cassava.
- Rice technologists! You need to read this blog post by Prabhu Pingali.
- UK’s Royal Horticultural Society report says school gardens are “vital”.
Farmers spread with farming
I was going to attempt to read and comment on a recent paper in PLOS Biology myself, but fortunately smarter people than me, who understand the subject better, got there first. So all I need to do is point you to Razib Khan’s explanation of how recent DNA analyses confirm “tentatively” the idea that farming didn’t spread into Europe as a result of people imitating their neighbours. Instead, the DNA suggests that spread was:
[A] classic demic diffusion process. This is basically a very simple model whereby farmers with larger population growth rates expand into the “space” of hunter-gatherers.
Now to do the same with their crops and livestock?