- The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
- No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
- Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
- What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
- And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
- But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
- Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
- Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
- Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
- The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
- How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
- Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?
Nibbles: Potaghurt, Yams, New fodder crops, Enset, Cowpea migrations, Trees
- Sweet potato and milk “potaghurt”. Just one way Ghanaian women gain from roots and tubers.
- Another way being through a US$12 million project “to boost yam productivity”.
- Dual purpose crops to sustain livestock and people in India.
- Qocho in Chicago. Calling enset “false-banana” doesn’t do it justice.
- Cowpeas came to Mexico from three separate continents, but is The Beaneater really eating cowpeas? Not necessarily.
- We need to see the trees for the woods, says a new book from ICRAF.
Mufhoho for the masses, finger millet for the rest of us
The Gaia Foundation recently featured a slideshow about the work of the Mupo Foundation. The slideshow is all about finger millet (Eleusine coracana) in Venda, a region of South Africa. Mupo says it:
[S]trengthens local communities in ecological governance by reviving indigenous seed, facilitating and encouraging intergenerational learning, and rebuilding confidence in the value of indigenous knowledge systems.
That kind of language probably wows donors; I hope so. What it comes down to, though, is helping young people to learn from those who have not yet forgotten about crops that are better for them and their environment. Finger millet certainly fits the bill. The Mupo Foundation is gathering, storing and sharing finger millet diversity, promoting its nutritional value, and preserving rituals and traditions that depend on millet. It would be nice to think that they could be funded under a new call for proposals for research on Improving rural livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa: Sustainable and climate-smart intensification of agricultural production. Maybe even trialling some of the 5957 varieties that ICRISAT says it has in its genebank, to see whether any can deliver additional benefits under changing climate regimes.
Nibbles: Mopani, Svalbard, Chestnut blight, West African eats, Megareport, Fungi, Smallanthus, Innovation, MSB video, Pacific bananas
- No more mopani worms in Zimbabwe. Luigi distraught.
- More tosh on Svalbard. Nobody distraught.
- Chestnut blight threatens UK chestnuts. Castanophiles distraught.
- The oily charms of West African cuisine. Did someone say “oily”?
- Another big panel of the great and the good has issued a deafening report; Gordon Conway, panellist, tells us “How to create resilient agriculture“.
- DFID fertilises Vietnamese mushroom farms. Kept in the dark and fed manure?
- Yacon spotted in Malaysia. Just ask for snow lotus fruit.
- The World Bank has published a Sourcebook on Agricultural Innovation. So can we all go home now?
- Step inside the Millennium Seed Bank. A video.
- ProMusa disentangles Pacific bananas, the better to conserve them.
Nibbles: African Funding
- Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda will invest $1.2 million each over the next three years to revive the Institute of Agricultural and Zootechnical Research. Local solutions to global problems.