Category: Featured

Jacob again, this time on genetic erosion:

Interesting! I have done some digging in this direction. I found that farmers were actually quite conscious about losses, knew the characteristics of the older varieties, but were not regretful about their loss, as these varieties were not resistant to certain diseases…

Read more.

Jacob casts gentle doubts on chile pepper domestication:

Intriguing explanation. But I wonder why the disperser birds and mammals are needed.

The thing is, he may be correct.

Dave Wood comments on UG99 myths, and then adds, perhaps provocatively, that

The current fashion for the on-farm conservation of crop diversity ignores the inevitable conservation of diverse plant diseases, some of which, like Ug99 of wheat, can cross continents on the wind and threaten crop production globally.

“Ignores” may be a bit strong here. Is not (one of the) explicit point(s) of on-farm conservation to allow continued co-evolution of crop and pest? On-farmers, over to you!

Patience partially pays; Bob answers Luigi’s year-old “what the heck is it?”

The word is Zulu, but also is also anglicized as Madumbe as in Zulu the “A” is almost silent. The plant is a Taro species grown in Natal and Eastern Cape in South Africa and looks more like the common Arum than the tropical Taro, the corm looks like the Arum corm. Just boiled it is delicious, unlike the Taro which is rather bland.

What we really want (obviously) is a binomial. Anyone?

Our friend Yurie makes sense of that Japanese video:

2 comedians visit Iwanaga-san to find out about research on agriculture that he’s working on. Iwanaga-san suggests that they would have a discussion (debate/battle) on the importance of agricultural biodiversity.