- Attention, francophones! Quels indicateurs pour suivre la diversité génétique des plantes cultivées? Le cas du blé tendre cultivé en France depuis un siècle.
- Et un colloque on how genetic resources respond to new environmental, economic and societal issues.
- Award for Kenyan vegetable enthusiast Prof. Mary Abukutsa.
- An in-depth look at land-sharing versus land sparing.
- “The age of the ‘mega-varieties’ [of rice] may be over.” Say it isn’t so, Joe!
- What to do with tomatillos, apart from salsa, that is.
- What to do with ancient walnuts, or rather, walnut tree forests. Save them, obviously.
Nibbles: Rice biofortification, Wild walnuts, Himalayan agriculture, Eating invasives, Gissen on wine, Medicinal fungus, Soil initiative, Ag development in S Sudan, AVRDC and WorldFish, Value chains
- Boffins to rice: Pump it Up!
- Saving the nuts of Central Asia.
- Nepali women abandon hybrids for landraces and community seedbanks. Weird thing is that it’s a WWF project. But where are the extensionists? If only they had listened in Bhutan. Ok that packed a lot of links in there.
- Never saw an invasive I didn’t like.
- Architectural theorist tackles wine. Not many people hurt.
- Turns out 57 insect species can play host to that famous medicinal fungus that led to war between Tibetan communities a couple of years back. Which helps how?
- An envelope is opened at FAO.
- Seeds come to South Sudan. One hopes they are of the right kinds. And that somebody is collecting what was there before. Maybe someone should call WWF.
- You want vegetables with your fish?
- Crops for the Future says not all middlemen bad.
Greek oranges
Happier days for Greece, celebrating the orange harvest in 1966. And if you don’t waste at least a couple of minutes at that sight, you’re a better person than I am. But why no embedding?
Nibbles: Ethnobotany talks, Cannabis taxonomy, Ag blogging, Breadfruit in Hawaii, Heirloom auction, Iron Age boozer, Andean potatoes, Minor crops conference, Insects as food
- And if you can’t get to Kew, how about an ethnobotany talk in Denver, Colorado? Or maybe one on GPS and plants, same venue? Can’t make either? Watch a lecture on Schultes in the Amazon. He’s the Father of Ethnobotany, after all.
- Misclassification of Hemp Holds Back Industrial Applications. Duuuuuuuuuude.
- Write a blog on youth and agriculture, win big money. Yeah, right, I’ve heard that one before… I’m still here, Sergey.
- Hawaii’s Breadfruit Festival is coming! So get in the mood.
- Sotheby’s auctions heirloom. No, really. Alas, probably no breadfruits.
- Now, what can I say about Scotsmen and pubs that won’t be construed as a racist slur? Probably nothing.
- Old potatoes helping Andean farmers cope with climate change. And, no doubt, obesity too.
- Conference on pesticide use on minor crops. Oh, to live-tweet that one.
- Micro-livestock makes it into the New Yorker. Can the backlash be far behind?
Yet more information on the food trees of Africa
A new series of booklets ‘African Priority Food Tree Species’ offers an important step in gathering existing information together, offering a synthesis of 11 priority food tree species native to sub-Saharan Africa, such as the Baobab and the Shea Butter tree. The series also includes recommendations for their conservation and sustainable use.
And very nice the results look too. But what the series of booklets also offers is a bit of an overlap with the Agroforestree Database. See for yourself for Blighia sapida: the SAFORGEN booklet vs the pdf you get from the Agroforestree database.
One does wonder to what extent Bioversity and ICRAF worked together on this, in the spirit of the shiny new CGIAR.