- $50 million for climate change. Must be some for agricultural biodiversity. Via, which has the application forms.
- How the Egyptians came to venerate cattle.
- Building a better bee.
- Official US rice harvest forecasts 20% too high. Chinese comment: “Without rice, even the cleverest housewife cannot cook.”
- How about without bushmeat?
- IUCN lists endangered oaks. Know any ex situ collections? Tell IUCN!
Blue bananas
Ripe bananas are of course yellow. However, under black light, the yellow bananas are bright blue, as discovered by scientists at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and Columbia University (New York, USA). The team, headed by Bernhard Kräutler, reports in the journal Angewandte Chemie that the blue glow is connected to the degradation of chlorophyll that occurs during ripening. In this process, colorless but fluorescing breakdown products of chlorophyll are concentrated in the banana peel.
I kid you not.
Nibbles: Poland, Aguaje, Climate Change, Seed Law, Apples, Seed Secretariat
- Growing a new agriculture in Poland.
- After açai? Aguaje!
- Hector Mongi is heading to a CTA seminar on Implications of Climate Change for Sustainable Agriculture. Hope he blogs it.
- “Anti-farmer” seed law in Pakistan.
- “Look,” he says. “This was an orchard.”
- Wonderful photos of autumn; agricultural biodiversity prominent.
- Afghanistan’s National Seed Secretariat opens, re-opens hornets’ nest?
Nibbles: Link, Mango, Chickens, Apples, Urban, Aquaculture, More chickens
- Our latest link. Mas du Diable in France.
- The history of mango in Florida discussed.
- Historic poultry publication.
- Did I hear somebody say English apples are not very interesting? Via.
- A wheat crop grows in Manhattan.
- Hands-on aquaculture.
- Animal farm.
Women’s Institute saves the apple
All this musing about worlds and grains of sand lately actually goes back to a discussion I had with Jeremy a few days back about whether or not it was worth nibbling a little piece on the apple fair which will take place this Sunday in the Millennium Orchard at Beverley Parks Nature Reserve in Long Lane, somewhere in East Yorkshire.
More than 40 varieties of apple are growing on more than 100 trees in East Riding Council’s 50-acre countryside attraction.
Unusual East Yorkshire varieties include the Hornsea Herring and Fillingham Pippin, which was found only in the Swanland area.
The council’s countryside access officers and members of the East Yorkshire Federation of Women’s Institutes (WI) joined forces to develop the orchard as a millennium project.
Worthy enough, but too parochial, Jeremy said. (Although he did in fact relent in the end.) And he’s quite right. English apples, for all their diversity, are not going to save the world like ones from Kazakhstan just might. And East Riding Council is hardly at the forefront of agricultural biodiversity conservation science. Fair enough. But I wonder if the Talgar Pomological Gardens in Kazakhstan and the Garrygalla Research Center in Turkmenistan might not have something to learn from the humble efforts of the East Yorkshire Federation of Women’s Institutes.
And vice versa, of course.