- USDA screens bee genes, does not find smoking gun.
- Organic industry needs to focus on “wider benefits to avoid losing customers to other ethical issues”. Er … right.
- M.S. Swaminathan talks to the Wall Street Journal. With added video goodness.
- UK newspaper discovers the threatened home of the wild apple.
- Sustainable farming is the way forward for Africa. Course it is.
- Blight resistant potatoes. No, really. They are.
- The Barefoot Beekeeper.
- ICRAF identifies a silver-bullet tree to revive African soils.
Nibbles: Caucasus, Quillaja saponaria, Cococnut picker
- Endangered Caucasian plants discussed. Presumably that will include CWR.
- Bark of Chilean endemic Quillay tree preserves chicken meat.
- “We call upon anyone to develop a product that can be used to pluck coconuts [while] standing on the ground. Anyone wanting to go ahead with this should submit a design and if it is approved they will be given Rs 1,000,000 to develop this product.”
Nibbles: Gardening, Maple syrup, Farming and conservation, Late blight, Urban guerrilla, Bizarre produce, Russian food, Aquaculture, Heirloom apples, Turkish medicinal plants, Bee-eating hornets
- NY Botanical Garden launches summer Edible Garden celebration.
- Thingy for getting more syrup out of maples invented.
- Farmer floods his fields on purpose.
- Insights into tomato late-blight resistance. Do try and keep up!
- A very English guerrilla gardener.
- Pictures of weird fruits and vegetables.
- Russian starters. Uhm, I spot a trend.
- The future of aquaculture: giant robotic roaming cages.
- Saving California’s Sebastopol Gravenstein apple.
- “Zeytinburnu Medicinal Plant Garden, opened in 2005, is Turkey’s first and only medicinal plant garden.”
- Something else has it in for bees: Chinese hornets.
Nibbles: Seed Conference, High carotenoid bananas, DIVA-GIS, Protected area map, Pulse domestication, Food policy, Torreya rewilding
- The 2nd World Seed Conference is coming up soon.
- Orange bananas make it big in the Solomon Islands. Thanks, Lois.
- DIVA-GIS website gets a makeover. Watch out for the blog.
- Global protected areas map mashed up.
- Dorian Fuller blogs lentil and bean domestication.
- Bookforum.com does food.
- While people discuss the pros and cons of assisted migration, one group has actually gone out and done it.
Nibbles: Urban bees, Borlaug, Cotton, Income, Mammals, Human disease, Caribou, Chestnut, IRRI
- There are 227 bee species in New York City. Damn! But not enough known about the work they (and other pollinators) do in natural ecosystems, alas.
- Borlaug home to be National Historic Site?
- Archaeobotanist tackles Old World cotton.
- FAO suggests ways that small farmers can earn more. Various agrobiodiversity options.
- About 400 new mammal species discovered since 1993 (not 2005 as in the NY Times piece). Almost a 10% increase. Incredible. Who knew.
- But how many of them will give you nasty diseases?
- The caribou wont, I don’t think. And by the way, its recent decline is cyclical, so chill.
- Saving the American chestnut through sex. Via the new NWFP Digest.
- “The best thing IRRI can do for rice is to close down and give the seeds it has collected back to the farmers.” Yikes, easy, tiger! Via.