- Cornell has some really cool videos online, including on agriculture. And a nice short one from Stanford about that paper on exposure to high temperatures.
- Getting an herbarium online.
- Urban food plants go online.
- For wine growers, conservation should include growing obscure varieties. Which you can find online.
- Gujarat farmers don’t need to go online to save seeds. But they could. They really could.
- POTUS comes face to face with biofortified sweet potato, likes what he sees. Same for Bill Gates and pigeonpea.
- UCDavis has a course on programme management for plant breeders. No, not online. Not clear if it’s part of that African Plant Breeding Academy thing.
Haiti turns to its local crops
The Economist had an article on food security in Haiti in last week’s edition. It’s worth reading in full, but I’d like to highlight two points here. First, the official in charge of “arable policy” at the ministry of agriculture, one Marcel Augustin, is said to think that
…Haitians should be encouraged to change their eating habits and adopt the diets of their grandparents. Locally grown crops such as yam, manioc, sorghum, sweet potatoes and maize were the staples of previous generations, who had rice [only] as a Sunday treat. They grow easily in Haiti and provide a nutritious alternative to rice… 1
Second, the article points out that USAID has changed its policy from simply handing out foodstuffs imported from the United States to distributing cash vouchers instead, which of course people can spend on locally produced food. Encouraging developments, the effects of which, on agrobiodiversity as well as food security, it will be interesting to follow.
Nibbles: Global health journal, Agroecology, Sachs & the MVP, British trees survey, Tunisian pear disease, Obama & biofuels, Seed Savers, Chaffey, Indian phenotyping
- The Lancet goes open source. Well, kinda.
- Alt-World Food Prize winners. None of whom are at the Conference on Agroecology for Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: A Transformative Agenda, though.
- I guess there’s no chance of Jeffrey Sachs landing the actual World Food Prize. Well, you never know.
- If you’re in Britain and you get the urge to measure a tree, now you can share your results.
- Maybe the Tunisians should do something similar, at least for their pears, before it’s too late.
- “The plan notes biofuels have an important role to play in increasing our energy security, fostering rural economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.” Riiiight.
- “We started doing this before heirlooms were fashionable. We knew in our hearts it was the right thing to do.”
- Quite a bit of agrobiodiversity in the latest Plant Cuttings.
- India goes in for high throughput phenotyping for drought tolerance.
Brainfood: Pear history, Markets & biodiversity, Conserving small populations, Niche & range, Sustainability in the US, Production forecasts, Sheep differences
- The Pear in History, Literature, Popular Culture, and Art. An oldie, but worth reading just for the analogy between the pear connoisseur and the opera aficionado.
- Effects of market integration on agricultural biodiversity in a tropical frontier. Darien, Panama. Roads are bad for crop diversity, of the interspecific kind at least.
- Conservation genetics and the persistence and translocation of small populations: bighorn sheep populations as examples. Bigger is definitely better.
- Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern. Specialist species tend to have small range sizes, making them doubly vulnerable. Trebly so if they have small populations too, I guess (see above).
- Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest. …depends on on-farm diversity, and here’s three things you can do to promote it, because it ain’t getting any better: collect statistics, redirect subsidies, and think beyond peak yield. Ah but wait, you may have to change the IP system. As you were.
- Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050. For rice, wheat, maize and soybean, current rates of yield increase, if they continue, which I suppose is a big if, what with climate change and all, would mean about 50% production increases by 2050, rather than the supposedly needed 100%.
- Genome-Wide Genetic Diversity and Differentially Selected Regions among Suffolk, Rambouillet, Columbia, Polypay, and Targhee Sheep. Suffolk is different from the others, which we already knew were related. Ah, but now we know where exactly in the genome the differences are.
Nibbles: Brazil flora & urban ag, Telling species apart, Canary seed for humans, Training breeders, Solitary bees, Tajik protected area, Rennell Island, Nordic grubs, Belize TV
- Brazil’s flora moves online. And its agriculture into its favelas.
- Taxonomy 101.
- Wish the people who wrote this press release on “canary seed” had taken a taxonomy course. It’s Phalaris canariensis, it turns out.
- African breeders to be trained at UCDavis. Ok, but what about WACCI? What’s going on? Cornell-Davis smackdown?
- Further proof, if any were needed, of the importance of wild bees.
- Tajikistan gets its first World Heritage Site. Includes most of the Pamirs, so surely a whole lot of agricultural biodiversity, both wild and cultivated, plant and animal. Not that that was the prime mover for protection, probably.
- Incidentally, there’s a list of World Heritage Sites in danger, and it includes Rennell Island in the Solomons. The reason I bring it up is that it is famous for a local coconut variety. Hope that’s not endangered!
- Nordic Food Lab gets money to experiment with cooking insects.
- Belize TV looks to agrobiodiversity to cope with climate change.