- Beer with shrooms. Well, not quite, but one can hope.
- No more corn detasseling? Say it ain’t so.
- “Oman to Plant 100,000 Coconut Trees in Dhofar.” That’s in the south of the country, a fascinating area. And one asks, as ever: What varieties, and what’s going to happen to the local material?
- Be like the bamboo, man.
- From DAD-Net, news of a mini-conference on the camel. And an article on same.
- The struggle for forest grazing rights in India.
- Dump blueberries, eat local berries, Brits told. Pavlovsk still in trouble.
Multimedia cacao
A couple of days ago we Nibbled a set of cacao photos from Sustainable Harvest International. I thought at the time it probably deserved better exposure, and I’m happy to be given the excuse to provide it by the appearance on YouTube of a sweet little cartoon on the cacao tree, courtesy of Kew. And by the start of a series of posts on how chocolate is made, by Rachel Laudan.
And speaking of cacao, this just in: A London hedge fund last week took delivery of contracts for about 7% of the world’s cacao producction, according to a report in The Guardian. (h/t The Tracing Paper). Coincidentally, or not, the price of cacao has increased 150% over the past 18 months.
CIFOR corrects itself
Those of you who headed over to CIFOR’s Facebook page to see whether they really did link there to a piece from the oil palm advocacy group Palmhugger trashing Greenpeace, as I said in my Nibble of a few minutes ago, will have been disappointed. It has gone. When I tried to comment on it, I was not allowed to, for the very good reason that the thing was not there any more. No, really. I’m almost 100% sure I didn’t imagine the whole thing. Did someone at CIFOR actually read the article and think better of publicizing it? What do they know about Palmhugger? I think we should be told.
Nibbles: Ecosystems, Coops, Cacao, Agroforestry
- Focus on ecosystem conservation: grasslands in South Africa, mangroves around the world.
- FAO says cooperatives are good for you.
- Great set of cacao photos from Sustainable Harvest International.
- Video Q&A on agroforestry with Dr Dennis Garrity, Director General of ICRAF.
Nibbles: Arachis, Hay, Flax, Green Revolution, Zea genomics
- Rethinking peanut genetic diversity. All you need is a new marker.
- Saving the English hay meadow. Hey, there’s a few crop wild relatives in there, apart from anything else!
- 30,000 year-old fibres not flax after all?
- Today’s modifier for “Green Revolution” is “old-fashioned.”
- Maize evolution is a tale of chromosome doubling and subsequent divergence of the two sets.