- Why do chillies differ in their heat? Ed Yong explains all, and links to the peer-reviewed paper.
- Frankincense “doomed”. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take a number. And a merry Christmas to you too, publicity hounds.
- IRRI to sequence 8.3% of its rice diversity. I’ll alert the media. No, wait …
- Speaking of which … Diversification of rice and diversification of languages; great long blog post explains how they illuminate one another.
- Agro-ecology is the answer, says UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. What was the question?
Nibbles: Wild rice, Food forests, Domestication
- It isn’t rice, but it is wild. And threatened, by disease, dams and climate change. h/t Sustainable Nutrition.
- Food forests. All you can eat blog post, with video goodness.
- Archaeology International goes more-or-less open access. Read all about The Early Rice Project, among other treats.
Nibbles: Coffee cryo, Potato catalogue, Chickpea Revolution, Community seed bank, Livestock gifts, Mexican grinding, Agroforestry in Pakistan, CGIAR, Japanese mint
- The value of conserving coffee diversity? Actually more like the cost, but anyway.
- CIP publishes a hardcopy variety catalogue. How quaint.
- The latest installment of the Consortium’s pean to the CG at 40 is all about chickpeas.
- Indian farmer to set up “collective seed bank for climate emergencies and future generations.” No word on whether he’s using Climate Analogues.
- I All African Horticultural Congress proceedings online.
- The case for and against livestock handouts.
- Mexican men do not grind.
- World Livestock 2011 out online as bunch of PDFs. How quaint.
- Pakistanis told to turn to agroforestry before it’s too late.
- Head of CGIAR says we need agricultural research to feed the world. Well he would, wouldn’t he.
- There’s money in them thar mints.
Nibbles: Law book, Sheep breeding, Pig breeding, Pink mushrooms, Coconut genome, Cassava genome, Apples in the Big Apple, Street food, Irish corner, Peach palm tissue culture, Seed saving, Kenyan farmers, First farmers, Tenure, Peppermint facts, Mountains, Taro network, Shea
- Juliana Santilli guest-blogs on the book Agrobiodiversity and the Law over at Agrobiodiversity Grapevine.
- ICARDA tells communities how to set up a sheep breeding programme.
- While an Indian institute breeds pigs, with Canadian help.
- Another Indian institute does the same for mushrooms, with no help.
- And yet another sequences the coconut genome.
- While BGI sequences a whole bunch of CIAT cassava stuff. Only yesterday they were doing rice. Yeah, but only 50, and you gotta keep those sequencers going, don’t you? Would be nice to know how much the CGIAR is paying BGI annually. Do they get frequent flyer miles? Have they negotiated a corporate rate?
- A Kazakhstan apple tree grows on the East River. A forest, actually. If it had been in England, it might eventually feature here. Ok, ok, our quest for connections is occasionally overdone. Made you look, though.
- Ah, kimchi! Ah, fish empanadas! So much interesting food, only one stomach lining…
- Danny tells us about Ireland’s CWR database. In other news, Ireland has CWR. Oh, and then he goes crazy on the Biodiversity for Nutrition mailing list. Did he get his goat is what I want to know.
- AoB on in vitro peach palms. Why read the paper, when AoB abstracts the abstract?
- Bifurcated Carrots on seed saving in Canada. Video goodness galore.
- And while we’re talking cinema, here’s news of a movie on a year in the life of four Kenyan farmers.
- From Kenyan farmers to First Farmers. The Womb of Nations. I like that. And more. Agricultural hearths. I like that too.
- Four days of discussion about land tenure. May not be enough, actually.
- “…70 per cent of the peppermint sold in the US is descended from a mutant in a neutron-irradiated source.” Good to know.
- I missed International Mountains Day. Again.
- That EU-funded taro mega-project from a PNG perspective.
- What I like about this Worldwatch series on neglected plants is that they’re not factsheets. Yet.
Nibbles: Bees and climate change, Native American seeds and health, Sustainable harvesting and cultivation, Tree death, Grass and C, Vegetables, Fishmeal, Big Milk
Today: Connections Edition, in which we pick low-hanging fruit, think outside the box, and join up the dots.
- The return of a US bumblebee. Is it due to climate change?
- “These foods have meaning” for a Native American tribe (and for Africans for that matter). So will they be able to check out their seeds? And sequence the hell out of them, like rice?
- If you want to harvest palm heart sustainably in the Colombian Andes, only take 10% of any population a year. Is cultivation an option?
- Trees are dying in the Sahel. And yet boffins don’t know how to kill them. No word on what the grass is doing.
- Vegetables and nutrition: the theory and the practice. Of course, a lot of them are grown in cities.
- Why is so much fish made into fishmeal rather than eaten? Location, location, location. Of markets, that is. Kind of like for milk.