Funding

Nibbles: Indian farmer, Indian farming landscape, Guatemalan protected areas, Old phones, Geo-data, HarvestPlus funding, Cavia, Agronomy, Bee bank, De-extinction

Bhogpur farmer Subash Chander Misra gets Plant Genome Savior Farmer award 2012 for pear conservation.
While a whole farming system gets protected in Kerala.
Hope it doesn’t go the way of protected areas in Guatemala. Maybe they need old mobile phones. Or a better roads or urban expansion dataset. Or maybe just their own maps.
UK government puts money where mouth is with grant to HarvestPlus. For things like this from ICRISAT. And have you seen the BBC slideshow?
Funnily enough, nobody talking about guinea pigs as a solution for malnutrition.
How Australian agriculture improved its water use efficiency. Clue: it’s not one thing. Good to be reminded, yet again, that’s it’s not necessarily always and only about the diversity. Keeps us centred.
Bees get a bank?
The de-extinction debate rumbles on. Centred, did someone say?

Companies should pay to protect ecosystems.
Like these? Hope they include some agricultural ones. Maybe even urban ones.
Why you’d want to is not least because of these plants. Which can be better for micronutrients. Not to mention mainly outcrossing.
Yeah, not all species are equal. Right?
I wonder if any of this philanthropic training money will go to work on rice wild relatives.

Why blogging has been light this week. And also, which resulted in this. Thirsty work …
Which is why I love our new hosts (see above).
There’s gotta be some of these around here.
I know there’s a lot of these. And I have to say I prefer the beer.
And as for the sort of things this guy made…
I wonder how many crop wild relatives there are around here though.
Or salmon.
Ok, that’s all from here for now, but see you again soon.

Britain gets a tree seed bank. Wait, it didn’t already have one? St Helena seems to, sort of. And Cameroon. And why they’re needed more than ever; and more. Although in Brazil trees can be the bad guys.
Bill Gates praises CIMMYT, and the CGIAR as a whole.
A Renaissance garden recreated in NYC.
A survey on moringa. And one on achocha and oca.
And speaking of deconstructing weird crops, how about saffron?
Yet another one of those GMOs-are-not-as-bad-as-you-think pieces. Is any of this getting through, I wonder?
Free range pigs in Kenya and the USA.
Speaking of free range livestock… Well, a species distantly related to livestock anyway. Oh, and here’s another restoration story, from another continent.
Free range glass eels too. And salmon, after a fashion.
Traditional potatoes in fancy Lima restaurants. Maybe with pork or fish?

Eat steak!
No, eat cicadas!
Farm pearls!
Get a grant!
CIAT got one, to map crop wild relatives!
Not sure if any of these drought tolerance genes in cassava are from wild relatives, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I would likewise not be surprised if both cicadas and cassava featured in Malawian permaculture.
Punjab’s 1st investigative e-paper doesn’t allow visitors to highlight and copy text, which means that the potentially interesting book about agricultural sustainability it mentions will go ungoogled.
Which is a pity because I was really hoping for a nice segue into this conference on, ahem, agricultural sustainability, to take place in a few months in China.
Which I could then have followed with a plug for the FAO Commission on GRFA, which many of us will be attending next week here in Rome.
No, wait: Agricultural Sustainability: Progress and Prospects in Crop Research.
But of course the best argument for sustainability is the moral one, right?
That. Or beer.