- Reminiscing at ICRAF about the history of (some of) the intellectual underpinnings of land sharing.
- The latest agrobiodiversity musings from Hyderabad.
- More reminiscing, this time from a GCARD2 social reporter.
- Dogs, the first domesticates?
- India links up its biodiversity databases. Including NBPGR’s?
- Iron-rich beans hit Rwanda. Rwanda reels from the impact. How long before someone thinks of dumping them into the ocean?
- “There will be no nice wine from Sweden this year.” Oh, dear.
- Documenting agricultural biodiversity. In Italian. Maybe Italy will now follow India (see above)?
Nibbles: Wasabi, Plant name checker, Finding birds, GFAR videos, Sweet potato pap, Taro genebank
- Up to their knees in wasabi. And, loving it.
- iPlant Collaborative’s Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS) ver. 3.0 expands its coverage.
- Marine bird e-Atlas goes live. Meah.
- GFAR tweets about old videos. Must be a reason for it.
- Podcast on using sweet potatoes in baby food. Might well come in useful more generally.
- My friend Valerie and former employer SPC get a namecheck in story about world’s largest taro genebank.
Nibbles: Animal abolitionism and not, Patents and not, Early agriculture, Brogdale, Soybean genes, Fancy phenotyping, Nexus principles, ICRAF databases, Transformation, Pest posters
- Animal domestication is murder. Will someone tell ILRI? And the Maasai.
- Indian home remedies at risk from nasty patents. I guess someone has been reading the Washington Post.
- Agriculture started as a response to the need for large amounts of beer for feasts. Can’t think of a better reason. All the more weird that it seemed to go pear-shaped in Britain, then, after a good start. Maybe everybody was drunk?
- The UK’s National Fruit Collection in the spotlight. So after that dodgy period, British agriculture did manage to get a grip, thank goodness. Probably for the cider.
- Multiple copies of a gene needed for nematode resistance in soybeans.
- PETting plants.
- “Ten principles to apply at the nexus of agriculture, conservation, and other land uses.” And almost anything else for that matter.
- Those ICRAF spatial databases explained.
- Bhoo Chetana in India and, admittedly under another name, in Peru. Transformation often means reviving old ways.
- Free posters of Top 10 plant-attacking nasties.
Nibbles: Crop mapping, GBIF brochure, Cassava books, Agroforestry and yield, Seed Savers
- Wanna help rogue cartographers map food?
- GBIF sorts out biodiversity informatics in 20 steps.
- CIAT compares cassava to Jesus.
- Long-term ICRAF study says legume tree intercrop stabilizes maize yields.
- “Every seed has a story to tell.”
The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near
There’s quite a lot of metaphor coming out of ICRISAT lately, for some reason. First we had Genes of Gold, referring to the use that the centre has made of the biodiversity within its crops in developing new, improved varieties. Then today we have a video on the Jewels of ICRISAT, which includes a couple of the aforementioned new varieties, plus the genebank itself.
The genebanks of the CGIAR, of which ICRISAT is one, have of course on occasion been described as the crown jewels of the system. They cost $21 million a year or thereabouts. Which seems cheap for crown jewels. Especially compared to the sort of price tag people are putting on saving the whole of biodiversity, rather than just that part of it which feeds us all.