- Dr Upadhyaya Goes to Tampa.
- SIRGEALC participants get prizes too. Maybe one of them can tell us about it.
- First uses of various food words.
- Punjab Black Beauty set to take the carrot world by storm.
- Bolivia conserves its potato relatives. When will it ratify the ITPGRFA and share the love?
- NASA going to grow plants on the Moon. What could possibly go wrong.
- Free trade apparently threatens maize and Mexican culture. I personally think both can take it. They’ve been going for a while.
- You know, I just have no idea what this silly piece about rice in Africa is trying to tell me. Maybe you can figure it out and let me know.
- Celebrating the cranberry.
Nibbles: Intensive livestock, Genetic erosion, Genetic diversity … in India, NUS, Domestication, Seminars, Nutrition, Prince of Wales
With sincere apologies for the lack of service. It’s just been that kind of week. For both of us.
- “[H]ow a powerful and intransigent agriculture lobby has successfully fought off attempts to reduce the harmful environmental and health impacts of mass livestock production.” Say it isn’t so.
- “[A] planet that has lost 75% of its plant genetic diversity between 1900 and 2000.” Mythbusters? FAO don’t need no stinkin’ mythbusters.
- Here’s a little historical context for ya, on Seed Collection and Plant Genetic Diversity, 1900–1979
- Striving to gain insights into agro-biodiversity through surveys in Bijapur, India will doubtless add, er, something.
- Round up the usual NUSpects:
- And the unusual: Alpine rice, aka Microlaena stiphoides, a newly domesticated grass down under.
- You want more on domestication? AoB blog has you covered, with pointers to wheats and the artichoke cardoon nexus.
- A little learning … Is a wonderful thing?
- Functional agrobiodiversity in North-West Europe: What does the future hold? 11 December, Brussels.
- Improving agriculture’s impact on under-nutrition: What do we know and what do we need to know? 27 November, London.
- EndingHunger Online University. Seriously, everyone’s an expert now.
- Cynical, moi? Not compared to the guy who wrote Implausible results in human nutrition research. Definitely one to cut out, boil lightly, season, and eat.
- Speaking of cynics, “The Prince of Wales writes passionately about the future of farming and the countryside in this week’s Country Life, which he has guest-edited on the occasion of his 65th birthday.”
You really can’t make this stuff up.
Nibbles: Dog fight, Deforestation maps, CWR maps, Food fight, Limpopo, Maize uses, CC adaptation breeding, Global Tree Campaign, Intensification & deforestation, American ginseng, Fish & crop yields, Fish oils, Perennially watching annual grains
- A third take on dog origins. Lock them all up in a small room and don’t let them out until they figure out a way to solve this. And more.
- Great new maps of deforestation. Same as the old maps? I’m confused.
- Ah, to be able to mash them up with crop wild relatives gap-maps! Or others, for that matter…
- Clear, balanced take on how to fix the food system. (And a great potted summary of why it is necessary to do so by the sainted Lawrence Haddad. The interviewer is not bad either.) Except maybe for the bit which sort of implies that the only way to improve crops is via GM. And for the other side…
- Bioversity comes up with a strategy for community seed banks in Limpopo and other areas of South Africa. Coincidentally, another CGIAR report on the same region, looking at wider food security issues. I wonder if the two could/should be mashed up? But really my main reason for linking to the second thing is to see how many people read the title as a plea for a return to old-fashioned cartography, as I did.
- Dual-purpose maize, shmaize. I just love that building.
- Latin American consortium looking for potatoes and wheat varieties adapted to new climatic conditions. Amazing that it is news, in a way.
- Global Tree Campaign launches new website. Sill no RSS feed though, that I can see. LATER: Here’s the feed, sorry to the GTC!
- Speaking of trees… Will agricultural intensification save tropical forests? Well, maybe. Demand elasticity comes into it, apparently. Dismal science indeed. I suppose those maps above come in useful for this kind of thing?
- In other news, the Middle Tennessee State University has a ginseng initiative.
- Teach a woman to aquaculture, improve her crop yields. No wait: Fish? We don’t need no stinking fish.
- 10 Ancient Grains to Watch. The usual suspects. This was pretty boring even when it was news.
Nibbles: Chocolate industry, Perennial grains, Digestibility gene, Potato in Africa, Maps
- Big chocolate to get bigger. What will it do to diversity?
- Gates Foundation funds perennial grains for Africa.
- Including sorghum, the perennial version of which may or may not include the latest magic bullet gene.
- Not including potato, though, which is also, however, being pushed in Africa.
- Great old maps of agricultural origins.
- And on the same subject, I can never resist etymology maps, especially of agrobiodiversity words.
Nibbles: UK collections, Rice domestication, Cattle domestication, Truffles, Yam chromosomes, Shiitake, Videos galore, Coffee and climate change
- Search the UK’s living plant collections for errant edibles and their wild relatives.
- Independent origins for aromatic rice varieties?
- I’ll see your rice varieties, and raise you independent cattle domestication in China.
- The scent of a truffle, love it or leave it.
- Improving the yam, with flow cytometry and satellite markers to discover how many chromosome sets they have.
- Going back to nature for the best in cultivated shiitake. With video goodness.
- The @gricultural Revolution, from CTA. Too cute, too loud, too long. With even more video goodness.
- “Local Farmer Grows Beans from the Basque Region.” I guess he’s not local to the Basque region, then, or it wouldn’t be remarkable. Yet more video goodness. Aside: I’ve grown alubias de Tolosa and they are wonderful, but I never was elected a member of the confraternity.
- You want even more video goodness? Here’s some on resilience in coffee farming.