- USAID and partners to probe African goat breeds for performance measures.
- FAO sings the praises of its seed fairs in South Sudan.
- Bioversity’s banana genebank gets a big write-up.
- Prunus africana, the aged gentleman’s friend, could also be the Kenyan farmers’ friend. In about 40 years time. If we start now.
- And speaking of domestication, efforts to tame Panicum turgidum as a new forage grass are under way.
- It wasn’t industrialisation that made English food bad, no matter what a Nobel Laureate may think.
- All that #abdchat, just in case you missed it live.
Nibbles: Musa, Millennium Seed Bank, Cassava conference & blog
- The banana in the Pacific. Including those orange ones…
- Swapping seeds at Kew. A genebank reaches out.
- Gosh is that all today? Looks like it. You guys out there have anything?
- No, wait, here’s something else. Huge cassava conference coming up, with its biodiversity on the agenda. These guys will probably be there.
Brainfood: Cattle, Coffee pest management
- Modern Taurine Cattle descended from small number of Near-Eastern founders. Only 80 founding females, so it was difficult.
- Implementing an Integrated Pest Management Program for Coffee Berry Borer in a Specialty Coffee Plantation in Colombia. It wasn’t easy, and it took time, but it worked; less pesticides, more predators, higher quality beans.
Brainfood: Beans, Potatoes, Lettuce, Agave, Gaming, Mangroves, Ancient millets, Ancient missions
- Mesoamerican origin of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is revealed by sequence data. Revealed is kinda strong isn’t it? This from a bean expert of my acquaintance: “Yes, we knew that, as it seems to be the case of all species of the Phaseoli section. They could have done a bit better in including the 2 populations of Cordoba mountain, in order to see whether these belong to the first migration to the Andes, or the second one. Wild vulgaris from western Panama, or Venezuela, could have helped in this regard too. We have shown years ago that the complex genetic structure in Mexico and in Colombia is the result of these floristic migrations combined with gene flow events because beans cross among themselves.”
- The Enigma of Solanum maglia in the Origin of the Chilean Cultivated Potato, Solanum tuberosum Chilotanum Group. These are long-day adapted and therefore crucial to the history of the potato in Europe. But the various sorts of evidence looked at to investigate their relationship to the rare Chilean wild relative S. maglia just do not agree. Bummer.
- Wild and weedy Lactuca species, their distribution, ecogeography and ecobiology in USA and Canada. So Iowa is a wild lettuce hotspot. If you’re interested in the germplasm, it’ll be in the genebank of Palacký University in the Czech Republic.
- Sustainability of the traditional management of Agave genetic resources in the elaboration of mezcal and tequila spirits in western Mexico. Tequila industrial agriculture should learn from the traditional kind.
- Fate of the World: computer gaming for conservation. Worth a try. No, really.
- The Economic Value of Mangroves: A Meta-Analysis. You might think there would be a value in the abstract; you would be wrong.
- Early millet use in northern China. That would be Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum, and new evidence from ancient starch grain on pottery and grinding stones found in archaeological sites has pushed back their cultivation in N China by 1000 and 2000 years respectively, to about 9500-7500 BC. The Archaeobotanist has more, as ever.
- Digitization and online availability of original collecting mission data to improve data quality and enhance the conservation and use of plant genetic resources. They’re there (and here; what’s up with that?) to consult and make use of if you want.
And don’t forget, you can join our group on Mendeley, subscribe to the feed, and have all this filtered goodness delivered to the RSS reader of your choice.
Nibbles: Commons, Tom Wagner, CGIAR, Domestication presentation, Sophisticated urbanites, Vavilov’s potatoes in the news, Perennial crops, African drought, Aegean lathyrism, Heirlooms
- The vocabulary of the commons.
- An interview with Tom Wagner, a great tomato and potato breeder.
- The CGIAR Consortium has a newsletter, with bits in it about what they’re doing on agrobiodiversity, genebanks (such as this one), all that stuff. But I guess news of this big Africa-wide food security project came in too late. Oh, here’s another one, on ICRISAT’s new chickpea.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison on domestication. I am reliably informed he once extracted DNA from a fruit smoothie using nothing but household utensils and cleaning chemicals. Pat, is there a video?
- Urban ag in the Philippines. For some reason, there’s been a ton of this sort of urban food stuff on the tubes lately. Like this for instance. And this (compare current orchards in London with historical ones). I may just have to blog about it. Oh dear, I just have.
- The Glasgow Herald heralds the importance of Vavilov’s potatoes.
- Long post with lots of different bits of info on lots of perennial crops.
- Monitoring drought in Africa via pretty maps. And more pretty maps in search of a use.
- Ancient Aegean lathyrism? Dirk alerted.
- A keeper of seeds does his stuff near Pittsburgh.