- Straws in the wind or portent of change? Why Farmers Are Embracing Social Media: the #AgChat Story
- Straws in the wind or portent of change? AGree (geddit?) Transforming Food and Ag Policy. See also Marion Nestle’s commentary and comments therein.
- More on the medicinal trees genebank in Nairobi.
- And just look at the new website of the International Potato Center genebank. Part of a complete makeover.
You say diversity
From the way she’s linking it to health in this snippet from her speech at FAO today, I suspect Hillary meant crop diversification when she talked about the work on “crop diversity” being done by Feed the Future. I wonder if anyone will be able to point out to her that there’s another, often overlooked, dimension to the diversity in farmers’ fields, which underpins the other, very sensible stuff she said about the need for improved varieties.
Nibbles: Red rice, Feed the Future, Heat, GM seed mixtures, Sorghum, Millet, Sturgeon, Vaccinium
- Anissa makes a meal of red rice from Western China eco-museum.
- Want to influence the US Feed the Future “global hunger and food security initiative”? Course you do.
- Peak heat and maize yields in the US. Bear it in mind when you read today’s flurry of interest in a new study from David Lobell et al.
- Seed mixtures not a good idea? Say it isn’t so!
- $4 million to continue development of biofortified sorghum.
- Cooking up a storm, millets edition.
- They’ve outlasted the dinosaurs, but they still need help.
- USDA gets blue in the face about blueberries.
Nibbles: Fair mangoes, Rice domestication, Saline collections, Spice collections, Aquaculture, Salmon
- Fair trade Haitian mangoes hit the shelves.
- Molecular boffins use nifty new toys to re-write rice history. Until the next time.
- The genebank of the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai has found material suitable for, ahem, saline agriculture.
- The genebank of the Indian Institute of Spices Research in Calicut has a large collection of, ahem, spices.
- The downside of tilapia.
- And, speaking of fish, it’s not all bad news.
Breadfruit roundup
Our friend Diane Ragone of the Breadfruit Institute has kindly reminded us that there’s been quite a lot published on her favourite fruit lately. Almost worth a Brainfood all on its own, in fact.
Beyond the Bounty: Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) for food security and novel foods in the 21st Century. Great potential, but “a deeper understanding of the nutritional characteristics and the development of new products and markets are needed.” Which is kinda provided, at least to some extent, by the next two papers.
Diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis, Moraceae) seasonality: A resource for year-round nutrition. “About 24 cultivars exhibited very little seasonality and produced fruit throughout the year. The rest of the cultivars could be clustered into seasonality groups with characteristic fruiting patterns.”
Nutritional and morphological diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): Identification of elite cultivars for food security. “…individual varieties … are particularly good sources of mineral and protein nutrition.”
