- From little acorns…
- Thanks for sharing, NordGen!
- Thanks for sharing, Kolkata!
- Nature special issue on Peopling the Planet.
- Rye soundbites.
- How to eat like a Roman.
- Videos on India’s pastoralists.
Nibbles: Hula skirts, Livestock at Rio, Sea buckthorn, Kenyan ag-blogs
- Grass skirts not made of grass shock. Nope, they’re made from cabbage palm. Ah common names.
- Farm animals set off on the road to Rio, kinda, sorta.
- Enthusiast cracks sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) propagation.
- The Bloggers Association of Kenya announces shortlist for Best Agriculture Blog.
Nibbles: Scuba rice, Climbing beans, Bees, Forests and food security, New avocados, Land grab, Homogenocene, Drought, Fibre, Organics, CBD, Bean breeding, Rice record
- The CGIAR Consortium finds a CGIAR success story. While the Guardian does another.
- Talk on honeybee diversity at UC Davis. Hopefully Robert will be available for comment. Meanwhile, across the Pond…
- Seeing the food security for the trees.
- Yeah I’m just not sure it’s such a good idea to name a new avocado variety Uzi, no matter how good it may be.
- Deconstructing the global land rush. And here’s the data… Jatropha everywhere.
- The deep roots of globalization. Move over jatropha.
- More on that paper on how to recognize a relatively drought-tolerant species.
- All tangled up in natural fibres.
- How to read organic agriculture debates. Just in case you actually want to read them.
- An Indian prepares for the Convention on Biological Diversity‘s meeting in Hyderabad in October. Not too early, is it?
- Bean breeders! Funding alert! You have nothing to lose but your diversity.
- India posts world record rice harvest — using System of Rice Intensification. Take that, doubters.
Brainfood: Alfalfa, Date palm, Apricot, Collecting, Reintroduction, Ribes, Payments
- Assessment of genetic diversity among alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) genotypes by morphometry, seed storage proteins and RAPD analysis. Morphology fits with geography, the others don’t.
- Insights into the historical biogeography of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) using geometric morphometry of modern and ancient seeds. Analysis of seed outlines using fancy maths identifies centres of diversity and migration routes.
- Loss of genetic diversity as a signature of apricot domestication and diffusion into the Mediterranean Basin. Or you could use microsatellites. Result: an Irano-Caucasian centre of domestication and two migration routes, N and S of the Mediterranean.
- Big hitting collectors make massive and disproportionate contribution to the discovery of plant species. Therefore, fund a small number of expert collectors in the right places. Luigi stands ready.
- Success Rates for Reintroductions of Eight Perennial Plant Species after 15 Years. Are pretty pathetic. Makes you wonder if all that collecting is worth it.
- Conservation of endemic insular plants: the genus Ribes L. (Grossulariaceae) in Sardinia. Seems rather a fuss for 1 species and 1 subspecies, crop wild relatives or not.
- Indicator-based agri-environmental payments: A payment-by-result model for public goods with a Swedish application. Hang on a minute, why is crop diversity not there?
Nibbles: Fungi, Pastoralism, Climate hoofprints, Ancient farmers, Pineberry, Yellow Rust, Rio+20
- Mushrooms in Art: why, and what good has it been.
- Keep moving that livestock; it’s more profitable.
- And … noted promiscuous communication expert confuses cow and elephant in search of livestock’s climate hoofprint.
- Best blog account of those Swedish farmers from Cyprus.
- Back to the strawberry’s future: meet the pineberry.
- Too late for Robigalia, yellow rust threatens triticale.
- Lecture of Dr Maurits van den Berg – “The future of land”. You’ll get nothing from the link, but the presentation made me wish I’d been there.