- My friend Zac bags a well-deserved award.
- Agricultural diversity in the Middle Ages: squirrels and cotton. And there’s probably more where those came from…
- Keeping score on agricultural research spending.
- Fermentables interview.
- What does this climate-smart agriculture look like anyway?
- And do they ever need it in the American midwest.
- And what in blazes is candlenut?
- A tool for documenting endangered languages. Maybe endangered landraces or crops one day too…
- Documented: One Sri Lankan farmer’s thoughts on sustainable agriculture.
- Not to mention the plusses and minuses of livestock — straight from the horse’s mouth.
- And the myth that will not die: King Tut’s peas alive and thriving. Kudos to Jackson Holtz, a properly skeptical reporter.
Brainfood: Synthetic wheat, Pisum, Maize products, Seed predation, Cajanus, Tripsacum, Horse domestication, Cicer genomics, Cereal vulnerability, Allotments, Conservation units, Chilie diversity, Endophytes
- Sources of resistance in primary synthetic hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to insect pests: Hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid and Sunn pest in the fertile crescent. Domestication do-over continues to show promise. Closest thing to a jetpack?
- Evaluation of seed yield and seed yield components in red–yellow (Pisum fulvum) and Ethiopian (Pisum abyssinicum) peas. Weird pea species show promise in Serbia, of all places.
- Consumer preferences for maize products in urban Kenya. Most still like it white. Not much promise there.
- Bush pig (Potamochoerus porcus) seed predation of bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis) and other plant species in Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s pretty unpromising for seeds, especially right under the tree.
- Phenotypic diversity in Cajanus species and identification of promising sources for agronomic traits and seed protein content. 14 accessions of 8 seem promising (out of a total of 198 accessions of 18 species from the ICRISAT collection).
- Genetic relations among Tripsacum species revealed by genomic variation. They might be promising.
- Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Wild Equus ferus moves out of eastern Eurasian steppe 160 kya, shows promise, gets domesticated in the western part, but continues to introgress with local wild horses as it moves out from there.
- Large-scale development of cost-effective SNP marker assays for diversity assessment and genetic mapping in chickpea and comparative mapping in legumes. What can I tell you. It’s large-scale. It’s cost effective. It’s promising. I’m still waiting for my jetpack.
- The socioeconomics of food crop production and climate change vulnerability: a global scale quantitative analysis of how grain crops are sensitive to drought. It’s the middle income countries that are especially vulnerable, and thus where all that promise needs to come good.
- Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from contemporary British allotments. Please promise to keep open-pollinated heirlooms out of the marketplace.
- Harnessing genomics for delineating conservation units. But you need to combine information from neutral and adaptive markers in fancy ways to fulfill the promise.
- Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency. It’s all about how much water is available.
- Endophytic Insect-Parasitic Fungi Translocate Nitrogen Directly from Insects to Plants. Suppose we better promise to conserve these things too then. And here’s the slightly longer short version.
Brainfood: Molecular adaptation, Chicken genetic resources databases, Cacao diversity, Pistacia molecular diversity, Glycene diversity, Sheep breeding, Bt cotton, Argan oil
- Broad-scale adaptive genetic variation in alpine plants is driven by temperature and precipitation. AFLP variation linked to precipitation and temperature across 13 Alpine species.
- Current state of knowledge on indigenous chicken genetic resources of the tropics: domestication, distribution and documentation of information on the genetic resources. There are three relevant databases on chickens, and yet…
- Genetic diversity and parentage in farmer varieties of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) from Honduras and Nicaragua as revealed by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. 70 SNPs enough to confirm 5 morphological groups, but also pick up the odd synonym.
- Molecular diversity and phylogenetic relationships of Pistacia vera, Pistacia atlantica subsp. mutica and Pistacia khinjuk using SRAP markers. The species are pretty good.
- Biofortified, selenium enriched, fruit and cladode from three Opuntia Cactus pear cultivars grown on agricultural drainage sediment for use in nutraceutical foods. It pays to grow prickly pear on crappy soil.
- Hotspots of diversity of wild Australian soybean relatives and their conservation in situ. Looks like it’s Kimberley.
- Community-based alternative breeding plans for indigenous sheep breeds in four agro-ecological zones of Ethiopia. They’re ok, but you do have to keep good records.
- Diverse genetic basis of field-evolved resistance to Bt cotton in cotton bollworm from China. Gene jockeys need to go back to drawing board. No, wait.
- Bioactive compounds and nutritional significance of virgin argan oil–an edible oil with potential as a functional food. Jolly high in just about everything that’s good for you, more research needed, yada yada yada.
Nibbles: CWR video, Super barley, Banana fermentation, Cerrado, Indian genebank sell-off farrago, Pistacia, Potato disease
- Al Jazeera discovers wild relatives.
- The Scotsman discovers the laws of heredity.
- Diana uncovers banana beer.
- Rio +20 hacks discover the cerrado.
- Indian genebank discovers the market?
- JSTOR uncovers the pistachio.
- Scottish potato farmers discover new nemesis.
Nibbles: ITPGRFA, Samoan coconuts, Ancient Amazon, Moringa
- CGIAR pushes ITPGRFA into Rio +20 limelight. ITPGRFA unavailable for comment.
- Recession or no recession, Samoan women’s group in Body Shop coconut oil deal.
- Pre-Columbian Amazon not densely inhabited after all. Just wake me up when they sort this out.
- Ok, where do I get my hands on some Moringa leaves?