Featured

July 26, 2009July 25, 2009

Featured: Climate change

Andy Jarvis gets real on climate change:

Why always assume that climate change goes in the direction of negative change? … More degree days will surely shorten fruiting time, giving you production earlier. Greater extremes between maximum and minimum temperatures in the day might give you sweeter fruit. And less risk of frost early in the season during flowering could increase production. I fear we’re predisposed to always see things negatively.

Indeed we are.

July 24, 2009

Featured: Weird vegetable

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

July 23, 2009July 23, 2009

Featured: Planning ahead

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.

July 18, 2009

Featured: Breeding perennial grains

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?

July 16, 2009July 17, 2009

Featured: Habitat Directive

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

Fresh Nibbles

Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from its cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cacao’s traditional growing belt.
And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.

Published on August 16, 2026