Category: Featured

Madeline nails the weird Chinese vegetable: celtuce, or stem lettuce, or wosun, rather than osun (Chinese: 莴笋; pinyin: wōsŭn).

back40 pooh-poohs the whole long-term-thinking thing:

The notion that we can usefully project that far ahead, make good decisions on a grand scale in any time frame, or somehow develop governance systems that would not degenerate, alternate or lose interest is rank nonsense targeted to the short term thinking and airy fairy fantasies of urban dreamers.

The article on perennials was really good, particularly the summary of what has been done. I just wish it wasn’t in ISIS. If the Land Institute wants to accomplish anything in the greater scheme of things, they have to crawl out of the holier than thou organic only everyting else be dammed mindset or they’ll just keep being ignored by mainstream breeders. It’s sad, really. We all need to work together.

Well why don’t you tell us how you really feel, Anastasia?

Shelagh tells us more about the Habitats Directive and CWRs:

You may be interested to know that a few years back I carried out some analysis of the number of CWR included in the annexes of Habitats Directive. The results can be found in Chapter 5 of the text book, Crop Wild Relative Conservation and Use for those that have a copy. I’m not supposed to circulate the pdf but since it may be of interest, I’ve extracted the relevant pages, but note now that I can’t add an attachment here.

Read more here. And here’s the extract: Kell_etal_2008_extract

After some kind words of encouragement for your faithful bloggers, as they plow their lonely furrow, Pablo unleashes hell on the genetic erosion meta-narrative:

I hope we can finally move beyond the unsubstantiated pseudostats on worldwide erosion of crop genetic diversity, more important and easier to quantify would be how much is being used in production systems where and by whom. Also there is the question of whether it is forever lost or can be recovered or expressed in new cultivars and crosses or in new environments.

As we’ve seen, that quantification of diversity in production systems could be done by looking at landrace names. Or could it?