Featured

April 5, 2009April 8, 2009

Featured: Tomatoes

There are a couple of disturbing factual issues I have with the SciAm article (I hope Steve Tanksley is being misquoted or quoted out of context, because I generally regard him as some one who knows what heâ€™s talking about).

Read the entire comment to discover what those “disturbing factual issues” are.

March 31, 2009March 31, 2009

Featured: tomatoes

Amy Goldman on Top tomatoes totted up:

Thanks for the mention of my work with tomatoes. I wasnâ€™t contacted for the Mother Earth article. Some of my favorite favorites did make the Top Twenty (including Orange Banana, Amish Paste, BIg Rainbow, Black Krim, Aunt Rubyâ€™s, Opalka); of course, Iâ€™ve got many other favorites.

Indeed she has, as this slideshow shows.

March 30, 2009

Featured: zoos

EJ on Zoos in Trouble:

Another reason that growing seeds in gardens and seed exchanges as well as raising the animals we need on working farms is so important. Once we give away our heritage it is at the mercy of fickle funders.

March 25, 2009March 26, 2009

Featured: Hardiness zone mapping

P Russo points out that

There is an interactive USDA plant hardiness zone map for the continental United States. And another map using USDA zone designations for the United Kingdom.

The map in question is the old map, and we’ll have to see whether they will update it when the new one comes out. The website is interesting in that it also includes distribution maps for a large number of native trees of North America.

March 24, 2009March 24, 2009

Featured: ABS policies

Cary Fowler suggests a novel approach to developing policies for access and benefit sharing:

Rather than start with the policies we may instinctively love and want, this pedigree shows us that we should begin with what we want to achieve, such as flood-tolerant rice, work backwards from there, and ask ourselves what policies will be needed to achieve such this rice, or UG99-resistant wheat, or low-toxin lathyrus, orâ€¦

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