Funding

Nibbles: GIBF, Identifiers, Farming animals, Geomedicine, Seed saving, Seeds of Success, CWRs, CORA 2012, Sourdough culture bank, Phenology, Wild Coffea, Cassava conference, Condiments, Gulf truffles, Cashew nut, Home gardens, Tea, Bacterial diversity

GIBF taxonomy is broken. We’re doomed. No, but it can be fixed. Phew.
Maybe start with a unique identifier for taxonomists? Followed by one for genebank accessions… Yeah. Right.
Domesticating animals won’t save them. And more on the commodification of wildlife. Is that even a word?
Geomedicine is here. Can geonutrition be far behind? We’re going to need better maps, though.
Saving heirlooms, one bright student at a time.
“Botanists Make Much Use of Time.” If you can get beyond the title, there’s another, quite different, but again quite nice, seed saving story on page 3.
“Why aren’t these plants the poster children [for plant conservation]?” You tell me.
Or, instead of doing something about it, as above, we could have a week of Collective Rice Action 2012.
You can park your sourdough here, sir.
How Thoreau is helping boffins monitor phenology. But there’s another way too.
“She drinks coffee. She farms coffee. She studies coffee.” Wild coffee.
Massive meet on the Rambo Root. Very soon, in Uganda.
Ketchup is from China? Riiiight. Whatever, who cares, we have the genome!
And in other news, there are truffles in Qatar. But maybe not for long.
The weirdness of cashews.
The normalcy of home gardens as a source of food security — in Indonesia.
Ok, then, the weirdness of oolong tea.
Aha, gotcha, the normalcy of office bacterial floras! Eh? No, wait…

It’s so exciting: Rio+20 is almost upon us. Here’s the CGIAR’s Call to Action. Maybe they could fix the splits too?
CIAT hopes to have some useful answers on food security and ecosystem services, in four years.
At Chelsea, maybe the sun will shine on seedsmen of old?
How they make flour from diverse agricultural products in Ethiopia video.
They’re commercializing camels there too.
Obituaries for bioinformatics tools. Stop sniggering in the back.
Third annual Malthus lecture starts in just a few hours. In Washington DC.

Pepe gets a prize from a queen.
The Princess of the Pea gives no prizes, though.
Oldest farming village in a Mediterranean island found on Cyprus. No royalty, alas.
The Emperor of Agricultural Statistical Handbooks is out. Oh, and the online source of the raw data has just got some new clothes.
Fish are in trouble. Well, not all. Kingfish, queenfish, king mackerel and emperor angelfish all unavailable for comment.
No royalty connected with these beautiful pictures of Asian fish either. Does a former Dutch consul count?
Quite a crown on this wild goat.
The Royal (geddit?) Botanic Gardens Kew’s Breathing Planet Campaign: The Video.
ICIMOD on the role bees (including, presumably, their queens) in mountain agriculture.

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?

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.