- CIAT 2014 annual report highlights role of genebank in its impact pathways.
- Kew post for International Day for Biological Diversity does something similar.
- Zambian poachers beat swords into ploughshares, plant peanuts.
- Turns out meat is not murder.
- Higher carbon dioxide can’t make up for other stuff.
- Great BBC Radio 4 series on The Meaning of Trees.
- Saving the Jesuit pear tree. Maybe they should put this on the radio.
- I’m not sure it would be so bad if prosecco ran out.
- Because the genomes of all of the components of beer have now been sequenced, so we’re safe.
- Have a a nice cup of chamomile instead.
We must cultivate our garden
No better way to find out why — and how — than by reading The Seed Garden: The Art & Practice of Seed Saving. And I’m not just saying that because I just got my free copy. It really is a fabulous book, as beautiful as it is useful. Thank you, Seed Savers Exchange.
Nibbles: Regreening, Dog & chicken domestication, Genebanks, Banana hybrids, Orange maize, IFPRI
In the footsteps of Vavilov…
It is an invisible, apolitical band of dedicated researchers around the world who maintain these gene bank insurance policies. They walk in the footsteps of Vavilov, who died of starvation in prison during World War II, while his staff suffered a similar fate during the Siege of Leningrad rather than compromise the seeds they had saved for humanity.
Here are some members of that band.
Nibbles: Beer from fog, Ecoagriculture, Slow oil, Greek diet, Livestock history, Biofortified millet, Zambian crops, Wild tomatoes, Trees & drought, Global genebanks, Saving coconuts, Industrial crops
- Fogcatcher ale? Oh I think so!
- Greenpeace guides donors on ecological farming. Booklet on the preservation of historical monuments to follow.
- Slow Food launches olive oil presidium. Presidium?
- The ancient Greeks had wine for breakfast. Explains a lot.
- Livestock size changes through the ages.
- The sainted Lawrence Haddad on that biofortified pearl millet story from yesterday. Remember that variety can be traced back to a genebank. But not only millet.
- Zambians told to look to their neglected traditional crops. By their government. Which is surely complicit in their neglect. Maybe biofortify them first?
- Collecting tomato wild relatives.
- July drought stops pine trees growing in the SW US.
- Building a global genebank system. And again.
- Saving the PNG coconut collection from Bogia disease. We need a Svalbard for coconuts is what we need.
- Industrial crops and food security in sub-Saharan Africa: mainly complementary, but…