- Mexico Promotes Agroforestry For Arid Areas.
- How to pollinate sweetcorn, because you can never have too many how-tos.
- Diverse sorghums for diverse uses in Burundi.
- Watch out for carbon-footprint labels on your wine.
- Looking for dynamite soybean diversity? Go to Sweden. Really.
- The New York Times discovers permaculture. h/t Mauri.
Mapping sacred sites
A short piece in The Times of India ((Which I Nibbled yesterday and then thought deserved more digging into.)) pointed me to a longer version of basically the same press release on an interesting project to map the sacred forests of the world. This is a collaboration between the Oxford Biodiversity Institute and the Alliance for Religion and Conservation (ARC), the latter of which is new to me. Worth keeping an eye on. Unfortunately none of the players involved seem to have heard of RSS.
Nibbles: Frogs, Sacred forests, Heirloom onions, Lobster, Przewalski’s horses, Marco Polo sheep
- Eating frog legs is bad. France surrenders.
- Oxford boffins to map world’s sacred forests.
- Lafort onion: from the Wellesbourne genebank to Irish Seed Savers to urban kitchen garden.
- Lobster 101.
- A wild relative in trouble any way you slice it.
- And one that gets around. Didn’t we blog about this before? Yep.
Gender inequity in agroforestry seed supply
You may remember that in last this week’s Brainfood we linked to a paper which looked at agroforestry input supply systems, and recommended a commercial, decentralized model for getting high quality tree seeds to smallholders. Now I’ve come across “Gender and agroforestry in Africa: a review of women’s participation.” The bottom line — not surprisingly, alas — is that women’s participation tends to be lower in enterprises in which there’s more money at stake. But this second paper only looked at the outputs, not the inputs. It would be interesting to know whether women tend to be edged out of commercial tree seed supply enterprises too. I suspect they do, which suggests that following the recommendation of the first paper for tree seed supply systems might result in even more pronounced gender inequity. So what could be done about it? Both papers include ICRAF staff as co-authors, though there’s no overlap. Maybe some of them have already thought about this and might like to comment here.
Brainfood: Chinese landscapes, Agroforestry seed, Italian lentils, Carrot heterosis, Taro in islands, Indian wheat, AnGR ex situ, Woodland shrines, Vitamin A, Caraway, Adansonia, Neotropical blueberries, Yeast genetics, Rotations
- Agricultural landscapes and biodiversity in China. Traditional farming practices good for biodiversity, modern bad. Therefore need intensification, to take pressure off natural habitats. But no, wait, that usually means monocultures and chemicals, which are bad. Oh crap. No mention of genebanks.
- Innovation in input supply systems in smallholder agroforestry: seed sources, supply chains and support systems. Decentralized commercial system probably best for getting quality agroforestry seed to smallholders. Unfortunately, nobody listening.
- Characterization of Italian lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) germplasm by agronomic traits, biochemical and molecular markers. I object in principle to any paper that says a particular landrace is “the best.”
- The relationship between heterosis and genetic distances based on RAPD and AFLP markers in carrot. It is positive. Was this really not known before in carrots? What am I missing?
- Genetic diversity of taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) in Vanuatu (Oceania): an appraisal of the distribution of allelic diversity (DAD) with SSR markers. 10 villages, 344 landraces, 324 distinct multilocus genotypes, genetic pattern reflects social networks. Situation in Andaman Islands not quite so interesting.
- A study of genetic diversity among Indian bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivars released during last 100 years. More diversity after Green Revolution than before, but steadily decreasing.
- Ex situ conservation genetics: a review of molecular studies on the genetic consequences of captive breeding programmes for endangered animal species. Restricted access, and you know what? I couldn’t care less.
- Consequences of wooded shrine rituals on vegetation conservation in West Africa: a case study from the Bwaba cultural area (West Burkina Faso). I expect there are some, but with restricted access, what’s the point of even linking?
- Evaluating sweet potato as an intervention food to prevent Vitamin A deficiency. To have an effect, you’d have to replace all the other types with orange-fleshed ones. Well, almost. Wonder whether it will be presented at the “International Scientific Symposium on Food & Nutrition Security Information: From valid measurement to effective decision-making” early next year.
- Evaluation of variability of morphological traits of selected caraway (Carum carvi L.) genotypes. They’re actually breeding this stuff in Poland. But they had to get their germplasm from botanical gardens around Europe.
- Variation in baobab seedling morphology and its implications for selecting superior planting material. There is some.
- Edible Neotropical blueberries: antioxidant and compositional fingerprint analysis. The 5 species involved have different ones.
- Population genomics and speciation in yeasts. There’s a question as to whether yeast species in fact exist in any meaningful sense.
- Cereal–forage rotations effect on biochemical characteristics of topsoil and productivity of the crops in Mediterranean environment. Continuous cereal stressed the soil.