- Sorry about the light blogging lately. I’m on leave and Jeremy is in the manure. Thankfully Robert has been picking up the slack lately, apparently because he has nothing better to do. Anyway, here’s a juicy roundup of Nibbles covering the past week and more. Starting with this stunner: Svalbard needs an adviser!
- Breeding better barley: The video. No videos, however, on breeding Africa’s orphan crops. Yet.
- Some of those are agroforestry species. Which is not confined to Africa, of course. But pomegranate is not included, alas for the Afghans. Nor the hazlenut, alas for the Australians, who will however admittedly probably sequence the thing themselves.)
- DivSeek does have a video, though.
- Even raspberry breeding has a video. But if this strawberry hack works for other plants, breeders might not be needed at all :)
- Orange-fleshed sweet potato folks meet in Ghana for annual jamboree.
- An insurance policy for agriculture? Yes, you guessed it.
- Recovering the NM chile. Hot stuff from a cold place. Yes, you guessed it. Again. (BTW, not only important in New Mexico.
- How to make a 17th century sallat. You heard me.
- CIAT on getting ahead of dietary trends. No, not from the 17th century. This being the current situation, however. And more specifically for dietary diversity among women. Yes, it’s all about diversification. Including in homegardens. Which were the great love of the great, late Olga Linares.
- The benefits would be so great to get nutrition right. And yet we haven’t. And without Olga it’s not going to be any easier. Maybe we could start by curing Indians of their pizza habit.
- The largest seed exchange in the world. It says here. There I was thinking it was the CGIAR genebanks.
- Rewilding Europe. Kinda sorta.
- The Dutch have new policies on conserving livestock genetic resources. At least yaks are not an issue.
- Meanwhile, the UK biodiversity indicators include one on crop genetic diversity.
- Maybe all it needs is better marketing, like these millets?
- Or perhaps a data portal, like wheat’s.
- Which may soon be out of date for the Punjab. Or should be, anyway, according to this IFPRI study. And also for the US, according to this maverick breeder getting a writeup in the NY Times.
- Be that as it may, help is on the way for wheat, in the form of its wild relatives. According to some people who should know.
- Interactive global deforestation map. Because we can.
- Black chicken? And why not? Not Icelandic, though, I’m willing to bet. Chickens? “…it was the forced opening of China by the West in the 1840s that made the modern [chicken] possible.” Not so the turkey, though.
- Ancient horse breeders liked spots. And then they didn’t. And then they did…
- Disease resistant Napier grass in Kenya. Must ask the mother-in-law whether she has some.
- Oh dear, Italian olives are in trouble. Again. Ah, yes, the olive, symbol of peace.
- Penang Botanic Gardens has a big birthday.
- Hope that keeps you going for a while…
Nibbles: Quasilocavore, Returning potatoes, Singapore veggies, Floating gardens, Timber trees, Allanblackia, Cranberry glut, Wild turkeys
- Sure, eat locally. But not too much.
- Andean farmers don’t have much of a choice about eating locally, but at least now they have more potato varieties to choose from.
- Growing your own is about as local as you can get in Singapore.
- Maybe they should do it the Bangladeshi way.
- A list of the world’s commercial timber trees (pdf). Can’t help thinking they should have made more of this.
- Which doesn’t include Allanblackia.
- Let them eat cranberries.
- Wild turkey with that?
Nibbles: R&D, Cheese double, Cali candied yams, Sustainable joe, Soy & deforestation, Cereals in Sudan, Big Ag, History of breeding
- ASTI says agricultural research investment in Africa is bearing fruit and needs to double.
- There’s a cheese revolution going on in America’s heartland.
- Meanwhile, the UK is worried about fake goat cheese.
- “Apparently, Californians like well-tanned sweetpotatoes.” Well of course they do.
- Good coffee AND conservation? I’ll take it.
- Soy AND conservation in Brazil? Well, not quite, but good news nonetheless.
- Cereal cultivation in Sudan pushed back several hundred years.
- What are the conditions for success in large-scale agricultural initiatives? You tell them.
- The history of crop improvement 101.
Brainfood: Pea spectroscopy, Phaseolus diversity, More beans, Brazilian rice, Trees in landscapes, German cherries, Appalachian apples, Sicilian sheep, Diverse livestock systems, Barley seed longevity, African wild veggies
- Using Fourier Transform Near-Infrared Spectroscopy For the Evaluation and Regional Analysis of Pea (Pisum sativum L.). Fancy maths reveals a low-protein content group, a high total polyphenol group and a high protein, starch and oil group in Chinese pea germplasm.
- Total phenolics, flavonoids, tannins and antioxidant activity of lima beans conserved in a Brazilian Genebank. No fancy maths used to figure out that they vary among accessions, but not necessarily only due to genetics. Actually, that goes for the previous one too.
- Potencial de uso de cultivares crioulas de feijoeiro no sistema de cultivo orgânico. Bean landraces do no worse than cultivars under organic conditions in Brazil.
- Evaluation of rice genotypes for sugarcane borer resistance using phenotypic methods and molecular markers. Resistant materials (a couple out of 34 tested) are genetically similar, and will now be used as parents in Brazilian improvement programme. No word on whether the results will be any good under organic conditions.
- Functional and phylogenetic diversity of scattered trees in an agricultural landscape: Implications for conservation. Brazil again. Scattered trees may not look as nice as closed forest, but they represent decent proportions of both its functional and taxonomic diversity.
- Physicochemical characterization of fruit quality traits in a German sour cherry collection. Some accessions are not only better, but more consistent, than commercial varieties. No word on to what extent they can be found scattered across the German countryside.
- Climate Change and Apple Diversity: Local Perceptions from Appalachian North Carolina. Heirloom apple growers are largely climate change deniers. That doesn’t make their orchards (no scattered trees for them) any less cool.
- Genome wide linkage disequilibrium and genetic structure in Sicilian dairy sheep breeds. Valle del Belice, Comisana and Pinzirita dairy sheep breeds are variable, though some more than others, yet they don’t overlap.
- Agricultural diversity to increase adaptive capacity and reduce vulnerability of livestock systems against weather variability – A farm-scale simulation study. Fancy maths show that more diverse livestock systems are better for ya. In France anyway. And that diversity doesn’t seem to include livestock diversity.
- Genome-wide association mapping and biochemical markers reveal that seed ageing and longevity are intricately affected by genetic background, developmental and environmental conditions in barley. Title pretty much says it all.
- Dietary contribution of Wild Edible Plants to women’s diets in the buffer zone around the Lama forest, Benin — an underutilized potential. Important sources of Cu and Fe, but even so not enough.
Nibbles: Chocolate, MAS, Cash crops, Medicinal plants, Rice domestication, Cat genome, Banana research, Artichoke history, Root vegetables, Diabetes data, eMonocot, Paris herbarium, Appleseed, Seed saving, Potato safety duplication, Seed atlas, Botanical Jurassic Park, Mapping urban fruit, Midwest road trip, Iraqi marshes, World Digital Library, World Parks Congress, Plant demography
- Ok here goes, there’s a week’s work of Nibbles we’ve got to catch up on.
- World running out of chocolate! Tell that to Cologne.
- Yeah well I prefer tea to cocoa.
- Greenpeace: “Smart breeding” will save us, not GMOs. Breeders: All breeding is smart.
- Guess the world’s biggest cash crop. Yeah, that one.
- Alas, it’s not included in the recent strategy for conserving medicinal plants. Not that it would need conserving.
- The domestication of the world’s biggest crop, period. Deconstructed. And if you want to drill down.
- And of the world’s biggest fruit.
- And of the world’s biggest pet.
- And of the world’s most difficult to eat vegetable.
- Root “vegetables” made simple. Because winter.
- And why you must eat your veggies, including the difficult ones.
- Videos on Kew’s monocot database and on the renovation of another famous herbarium.
- The real Johnny Appleseed.
- But you too can save seeds, just like Johnny.
- But don’t forget to safety duplicate, like CIP has done, at Embrapa.
- And this shows you what those seeds can look like.
- You don’t necessarily need seeds to save plants, though.
- Mapping fallen fruit. Because we can.
- Road trip!
- Boat trip!
- Selected Techniques in the Art of Agriculture. From French to Turkish to Arabic. One of many nifty agriculture-related resources in the World Digital Library.
- Oh yeah, the IUCN World Parks Congress has been on and its all over the intertubes. Including with neat visualizations, natch.
- How many of the species in the COMPADRE database of plant demography information are in protected areas? How many are crop wild relatives? I need an intern.