- The wages of Kenyan rose growers increase 22% — to $59 a month. Sinful.
- Wheat stripe rust uses sex to break down barriers.
- Q&A with Cuban whiz Humberto Ríos.
- Latest Carnival of Evolution is up; we’re the only ag, alas.
- Proposed agricultural biodiversity heritage sites in India. (Is this new?)
- Investing in Underutilised Crops to Achieve Food Security. A report from the CGARD conference in March.
- The Hanging Gardens of Kenya.
- Living in genetic mixtures helps plants against herbivores. No, really.
- “Restoring human cultures to the web of life.”
International Day for Biodiversity in Nairobi
If you’re in Nairobi, Kenya, next Saturday 22 May and you feel like celebrating the UN’s International Day for Biodiversity in this, the UN’s International Year for Biodiversity, you could do worse than pop along to the National Museum of Kenya’s Louis Leakey Auditorium for the first Nairobi Agrobiodiversity Debate. Kick off is at 11.30 a.m., and this is what you can expect, according to the organizer’s website:
Hans R Herren, an internationally recognized scientist and current president of the Millennium Institute (Washington, D.C., USA), will be the key note speaker. Hans’s fellow panelists will include Professor Steven Gichuki, Dean, School of Environmental Studies Kenyatta University and Patrick Maundu, an Ethnobotanist with National Museums of Kenya and Honorary Research Fellow with Bioversity International (Kenya and Dr Balakhrishna Pisupati from UNEP along with a few more special guests. The Nairobi Agrobiodiversity Debates will be moderated by our very own Dr Toby Hodgkin, Coordinator of the Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research and Principal Scientist with Bioversity International (Italy).
We’ll gratefully accept any first-hand reports.
Nibbles: Poppies, Breeding, American panmixis, Hemp, Bra, AnGR
- Breeders called on to save key Afghani crop. No, not really.
- GMOs not incompatible with organic, round 2.
- The Columbian Exchange. People though, not crops.
- USDA chief botanist was into Cannabis shock.
- Novel way of growing rice unveiled.
- Two livestock pdfs: What 2010 means for farm animal genetic resources conservation. And a book on European local breeds.
Deconstructing the spread of agriculture
Did agriculture move in the hands of people, or with the words of people? Or, somewhat more prosaically:
Two alternative models have been proposed to explain the spread of agriculture in Europe during the Neolithic period. The demic diffusion model postulates the spreading of farmers from the Middle East along a Southeast to Northeast axis. Conversely, the cultural diffusion model assumes transmission of agricultural techniques without substantial movements of people.
Actually not just Europe. And the jury is still out. Two recent paper both tilt towards cultural diffusion, both in Europe (which is where the above quote comes from; but not everybody agrees) and Island SE Asia. This sort of work is mainly done by anthropologists and human geneticists. Sometimes the genetics of livestock or crops are brought into play, but only rarely both at the same time. A grand synthesis of human, livestock and crop genetic data, archaeology and anthropology remains to be done…
Nibbles: Recognizing breeds, Cannabis in New Zealand, Farming systems data, Maize inbreds, Zinc in wheat, Markets for nature, Ramie, Milk and drought, ELBARN
- Computer program recognizes cattle breeds.
- NZ dope getting stronger? Maybe, and I hope so, but probably impossible to tell from this study.
- Need farming systems data?
- Psst, wanna know how to determine the essentially derived status of maize inbred lines?
- High zinc wheat works.
- Michael Jenkins of Forests Trends on using markets to save biodiversity.
- The phylogeny of ramie and its wild relatives sorted out. Sort of.
- Pearl millet landraces are the best under drought.
- Area action plans for local breeds in Europe are out.