- Sometimes all it takes is a goat.
- Or a camel.
- I wonder how either would figure into a metric for a sustainable diet. Wonder if these people will be interested in those metrics.
- Cassava figures in lots of different ways.
- No word on whether carbon dioxide will affect its nutrient content the way it does with other crops.
- Who cares, it’s yield we’re after. Well, that’s in trouble too in some parts of Africa.
- That’s the only way those African seed start-ups are going to survive.
- Yeah, but disease resistance is important, Shirley. PlantVillage gets a blog.
- And weeds? Don’t forget the weeds. Although of course some of them you can eat. Put that in your metrics.
- Meanwhile, France starts to re-wild. Would love to see some wild relatives in the Bois du Boulogne. Livestock wild relatives, not your crazy cousin on his gap year.
- And now we can figure out what climate change might do to them. I guess this thing might work for European animals. Says here it works for Australian trees.
- Speaking of France, garlic is quintessentially French, isn’t it? Well, maybe, but it’s also very Korean, in its black, cured form.
Nibbles: Coffee rust, Wheat blast, Livestock yield gap, Livestock adaptation, Extension, Med diet, Organic < conventional, Douglas fir breeding, Best moustache in cryo, Fortifying rice
- Coffee rust is doing a number on livelihoods in Central America.
- Wheat blast could do the same in South America.
- ILRI DG on smallholder livestock producers: one-third don’t have the conditions in which to be viable, one-third can go either way and one–third can be successful. I suppose all of them are going to need adaptation options.
- Not to mention extension services.
- Meanwhile, bureaucrats busy protecting the Mediterranean diet.
- The inevitable productivity penalty of organic.”
- Douglas fir ready for its genomic closeup.
- Cryopreservation update, with video goodness.
- Lots of ways to skin the malnutrition cat: zinc and rice.
Asian forest talkfest finally off the ground
The Forests Asia Summit 2014 starts today, with the usual panoply of social media accoutrements. Let’s get #forestasia trending, shall we? The landscape perspective seems to be to the fore, so there should be at least some dialogue with agriculture. You can let us know about it here, if you like.
Nibbles: Food future, Bean breeding 101, Yield gaps, Mitigation strategies, Sparing vs sharing, Diverse diets, Open seeds, Fake seeds, Florida citrus threat, Hot chicks, Nutrition nuggets
- Food? We don’t need no stinking food.
- Bean breeder begs to differ.
- Where we could do with more food.
- Nobody’s talking about mitigation any more. Oh yes they are.
- Land shparing is the answer.
- ICRAF decides to gather evidence for the benefits of agroforestry for nutrition.
- More on those open source seeds. Which I hope nobody will counterfeit.
- Florida needs new grapefruits, whether open source or not.
- Naked neck chickens look weird, but they may be really heat resistant, so get over it. Ghana has.
- Canadian grad students summarize nutrition research in a pithy sentence. Sound familiar?
Nibbles: Extreme aquaculture, GMO ver. 2.0, Wheat genebank, Infrared coffee spectroscopy, Farmer photos, Land grab, Reindeer herder photos, Mapping blight, Food security software, Fragaria moschata
- Farming cobia off Panama. Look it up.
- Gene editing is the future. But is it GM?
- More on the CIMMYT genebank from the Australian press. Get a room already.
- Fancy machine can tell fancy Yemeni coffee from lesser stuff. No, not DNA. Producers of lesser stuff unavailable for comment.
- Some of them may end up being photographed by National Geographic though.
- Before being forced off their land.
- Different sort of land grab in the Gran Chaco. Pity those poor wild Arachis. And here’s a meta-analysis of the drivers of the problem.
- Feeling left out, herders get fancy photos too.
- “The data indicates a broad distribution of this clone from Spain to Russia and Scotland to Cypress.” Good grief. Potato blight, if you’re still interested.
- From household survey data to food security assessment: The software.
- The bubbleberry is increasingly a thing.