- Ok, now you have no excuse not to eat taro.
- Do your bit to help pawpaws (Asimina triloba) go viral. No, wait, that didn’t come out right.
- “Pica is an unexplainable food curiosity—the overwhelming desire to eat the inedible.” Or, as we say in my house, German food.
- Tuscan seed journey.
- Living off forest foods can be fun.
- Pork beats beef.
- Picturing the Earth. Some of it ain’t pretty. But even then it’s pretty.
- Picturing working dogs. All of them pretty.
- Kenyan chef Ali L’artiste tucks into Rwandan bananas and beans before it’s too late.
Nibbles: CWR conservation, Small farms & food security, iPlant, Forgotten edibles, James Wong, Google Earth Pro, Wageningen course, Journalism fellowship, Vavilov-Frankel
- Draft technical guidelines from FAO on conserving crop wild relatives at national level.
- Small farms are beautiful.
- Finding the climate adaptation needle in the genomic haystack. Hint: supercomputers needed. DivSeek alerted?
- Emma Cooper asks: “…have you got a favourite ‘forgotten’ edible plant that you’d like to champion?”
- James Wong talks about that kind of thing too, and much else garden-related besides, on his new website.
- Rejoice, Google Earth Pro is now free!
- Wageningen UR course on Food For All.
- UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is offering ten $10,000 postgraduate Food and Farming Journalism Fellowships. ‘Nuff said.
- Speaking of fellowships: the 2015 call for Bioversity’s Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship is open.
- Possible new Cannabis species from Australia: watch them do the DNA work and spoil it. Gap analysis, anyone? … As you were, didn’t need DNA after all.
Nibbles: Tonga, Seeds, Fusarium wilt, Fungal beer, Cover crops, Gates Foundation
- Tonga joins the ITPGRFA. About time too. I started talking to them about it 10 years ago.
- What exactly does it mean to be “amped” about seeds? And do they have to be organic? And do these Filipino ones qualify?
- Enough with the banana scare stories already!
- Go on, nominate someone for the World Food Prize.
- Mushroom beer? Yeah, ok.
- USDA waxes nerdy about cover crops.
- Gateses’ Big Bet for African agriculture. Move along, nothing to see here.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust meets its stakeholders at Green Week
Lots going on today.
The Crop Trust’s First Stakeholder Discussion will be held on 16 January 2015 in Berlin, Germany, in conjunction with the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA), during the annual Green Week International Agricultural Fair. Its thematic focus will be on the central role of international crop collections in preserving crop diversity…
It all starts at 4pm. Follow on Twitter, if you dare. And yes, that’s a new logo and website.
Nibbles: Prof Brian Cox is cool, GRAIN vs Gates, Fragaria law suit, Central Asian fruits, Ecoagriculture, Forage breeding risk, WPC 2014, Nutrition trifecta, MSB funding, European seedsters support IT
- Final Human Universe episode features Svalbard Global seed Vault.
- GRAIN objects to where Gates Foundation spends its money. Nobody much cares.
- Latest on that UC Davis strawberry breeding programme debacle.
- Yes, bears do shit (apple seeds) in the woods. And some context.
- A conference for the hippy in all of us.
- The dark side of pasture breeding. Super-weed, I am your father!
- World Parks Congress on soon too.
- No access to healthy food? Use your mobile! Watch a video! Grow traditional crops!
- Toyota funds the Millennium Seed Bank.
- ESA supports the ITPGRFA. Speak Up For Seed!