- On farm conservation; Bioversity is really good at it. (And I sometimes make a linking mistake; mea maxima culpa.)
- Economics of plant genetic resource management for adaptation to climate change. What’s the bottom line? No idea.
- Something else Bioversity is really good at: newsletters.
- Using GIS to help communities map vegetable production and marketing in Bangkok. I like the acronym: V-GIS.
- The variety of non-chile peppers.
- Older fruits better. Quentin Crisp unavailable for comment.
Agrobiodiversity in ice-cream
Nibbles: Farmer Assisted Natural Regeneration, Fungal apocalypse, Fertilizer platitudes, Sahel Restoration, Forest Restoration, Innovation, Phosphate bioavailability, Katniss, Ecoagriculture, Intensification
- Bunch of presentations from ICRAF’s #BeatingFamine shindig in Nairobi online.
- Humungous fungus threat.
- Fertilizers good for yields. Say what?
- A study on land restoration in Burkina Faso. Just in time.
- Speaking of restoration, chocolate can restore tropical forests. Universal panacea, obviously.
- Farming First welcomes the World Bank’s guide to investing in agricultural innovation systems. Buy low, sell high?
- A Cisgenic Approach for Improving the Bioavailability of Phosphate in the Barley Grain. That’ll please the folks who are scared of transgenics.
- I’ve missed out on the whole Hunger Games thing, but I have grown Katniss. I called it wapato.
- Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture creates a Department of Ecoagriculture. Sign of the times?
- New dossier from Spore, on sustainable intensification. No time to digest it yet.
Nibbles: Domesticating fruit trees, Plains Indians, Weedy rice, Prize, Maize festivals, Ifugao, Bangladeshi diets, Pacific hopes, Plant patents
- Domesticating fruit trees for food and profit. But why the “scare quotes” around clone?
- Indians 101: Northern Plains Agriculture.
- A different kind of weedy wild relative; feral rice.
- Great, innovative agricultural scientist? Prizes await you.
- Mexico’s corn festivals celebrate diversity – but why bring opposition to GMOs into it?
- Project to help the people who created and manage the Ifugao rice terraces to cope with climate change. Stay tuned.
- Project to “diversify … diets to improve nutrition and incomes in Bangladesh”. Stay tuned.
- And countries of the Pacific look to crop diversity to manage climate variability. Stay tuned.
- Can a farmer commit patent infringement just by planting soybeans he bought on the open market? Good question; stay tuned.
Brainfood: Dietary diversity, Diversity and diseases, Soil IK, Insect symbionts, Rhizobia, Wild lettuce, Tree genetic erosion, Pre-domestication barley, Strampelli
- Relating dietary diversity and food variety scores to vegetable production and socio-economic status of women in rural Tanzania. Dietary diversity was all too often alarmingly low, and when it was it was associated with seasonal fluctuations in the production and collecting of vegetables. But a more varied diet need not necessarily be healthier, so more procedural sophistication will be necessary in follow-up studies.
- A risk-minimizing argument for traditional crop varietal diversity use to reduce pest and disease damage in agricultural ecosystems of Uganda. For Musa and beans, more varietal diversity meant less damage and less variation in damage.
- Exploring farmers’ local knowledge and perceptions of soil fertility and management in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Soils which farmers described as being more fertile were, ahem, more fertile.
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Important because they can confer protection from natural enemies, among other things. They behave a bit, but not entirely, like beneficial nuclear mutations.
- Widespread fitness alignment in the legume–rhizobium symbiosis. There are no cheaters.
- Genetic polymorphism in Lactuca aculeata populations and occurrence of natural putative hybrids between L. aculeata and L. serriola. Not much diversity in Israel, surprisingly. But isozymes?
- Meta-Analysis of Susceptibility of Woody Plants to Loss of Genetic Diversity through Habitat Fragmentation. The standard story — that trees suffer less genetic erosion because they are long-lived — is apparently wrong, even for wind pollinated trees.
- Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria. “This was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals.”
- Nazareno Strampelli, the ‘Prophet’ of the green revolution. Before Norman, there was Nazareno.
- The memory remains: application of historical DNA for scaling biodiversity loss. Historical collections of salmon scales reveal many connections between modern evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in the Columbia River and old ones; but also, intriguingly, some differences.