- Where should we collect sweet potato wild relatives?
- Cheese made from toe bacteria. Because we can.
- The sainted M.S. Swaminathan on millets.
- FAO brings together dietary guidelines from around the world.
- An infographic on kale origins.
- Diversity down, productivity down. At least in Alaska.
- Cotton’s got a genome.
- McDonalds commits to ending deforestation in its supply chain.
- IUCN report says commercial agriculture and forestry could could actually be good for biodiversity. Hope McDonalds read it.
Nibbles: Svalbard double, AgAtlas upgrade, Ornamental database, Wild apples, Genetic garden, Sandalwood trade, Amazon dams, Body bacteria, ICRISAT blog, African greens, Aquatic camel, Mujer empowerment
More of a proper catch-up Nibbles later, but these should hold you for a while.
- Le Figaro goes to Svalbard.
- But Wired goes into much more depth on the tragic situation in Syria.
- Many AgAtlas pages now include interactive mapping and data download, eg AEZ. About time :)
- Looking for information on varieties of ornamental plants? Look no further.
- Diversity in wild European apples: past, present and future.
- Genetic garden opens in Bangalore.
- The perils of sandalwood smuggling.
- Dam the Amazon, full speed ahead! What will happen to all that human body bacteria diversity?
- ICRISAT’s new DG has a blog. Looking forward to his first foray into the genebank.
- Lots of stuff on African traditional veggies in AVRDS’s latest newsletter.
- The swimming camels of Gujarat get protection. I’d pay money to see them, I really would.
- Patagonian women farmers are doing it for themselves, at last.
Nibbles: Old date, Cassava genomic selection, Citizen science double, Cover crops, Quinoa boom, Sorghum boom, Teff boom, Gluten, Malnutrition roundup, African veggies, Farmer2farmer, Double chocolate
- That 2000-year old date palm seed is all grown up.
- And since we’re talking ancient stuff: ornithology in the service of egyptology.
- Citizen scientists track phenology.
- Citizen scientists find new species.
- Let’s hear it for cover crops.
- Turns out it’s ok for hipsters to eat quinoa.
- Sorghum takes over the Great Plains. (Well, not really.) And not only… Who needs quinoa.
- Especially when you have teff.
- And while we’re on gluten: need to make up for that off-colour quip in the last Nibbles.
- Malnutrition. Mapped. Including that much-discussed Missing Middle? Hang on, wait, here’s another nutrition mapping thing.
- African leafy greens in Benin get a video. Map that!
- Farmers make good extensionists.
- Chocolate workshops at Kew.
- Caribbean chocolate to get a make-over. Somebody telling Kew?
Brainfood: Camelina improvement, School garden impact, Biodiversity rice, Seed networks, Indian wheat geography, Protected areas, Late blight resistance, Peanut biotech
- Camelina as a sustainable oilseed crop: Contributions of plant breeding and genetic engineering. It will help that it’s close to Arabidopsis.
- Sustenance and sustainability: maximizing the impact of school gardens on health outcomes. You need proper experimental design if you’re going to say that such an impact exists. But such an impact probably exists, sometimes.
- Consumer preferences for agricultural products considering the value of biodiversity conservation in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Consumers are willing to pay extra for crane-friendly rice. Or at least they say they are.
- An Analysis of Social Seed Network and Its Contribution to On-Farm Conservation of Crop Genetic Diversity in Nepal. Fancy software shows farmers exchange seeds, and it’s important.
- Spatial Distribution of Trait-specific Diversity in Indian Wheat Collections. From 5930, 3973 are geo-referenced, showing where more collections need to be made. Unless of course they are among those 1957 and nobody can tell.
- Walk on the Wild Side: Estimating the Global Magnitude of Visits to Protected Areas. 8 billion visits per year (80% in Europe and North America), generating $600 billion per year in direct in-country expenditure and $250 billion in consumer surplus. Remember that we spent $10 billion per year worldwide in safeguarding protected areas.
- Allele Mining in Solanum Germplasm: Cloning and Characterization of RB-Homologous Gene Fragments from Late Blight Resistant Wild Potato Species. 17 gene fragments from 11 wild potato species could be useful in breeding for late blight resistance.
- Genetic diversity of the world’s largest oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) field genebank accessions using microsatellite markers. Extreme West Africa group, West-Central-East Africa group and Madagascar group, with the last quite distinct.
- Progress in genetic engineering of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) — A review. Our jetpacks are in the mail.
Nibbles: Old pretzel, Wine podcast, Nordic podcast, Tea history, Pacific pests app, Eating bugs, Chicken history, African superfoods, Gender, Access to seeds, Sorghum beer, Making mead, Cumin, Bolivian school meals, MLN, Hidden hunger conference, CIP & IK, Potato Park, CIP’s Sawyer, Saving wheat, Resettlement, Sustainable cacao, Deforestation map, Language map
Again, sorry for slow blogging last week. Work, you know. Here we play catch-up.
- While we were away, we reached 6000 Twitter followers! Thanks, everyone!
- And Germans found a 250-year-old pretzel. Wait, you can get those at Kamps every day though. (Bonn inside joke.)
- Oh, and Jeremy talked to a wine expert about how to become a wine expert.
- But he has competition from the Nordic Food Lab now. What are you waiting for, subscribe to both!
- Since we’re on podcasts, Laszlo Montgomery’s monumental ten-part blockbuster on the history of tea in China recently came to a close.
- Talking of iTunes, ver. 2 of the Pacific Pest and Pathogens app is out.
- Don’t want to get into the whole eating insects thing? Feed them to your chickens instead.
- There’s even an infographic about that now.
- But what will it do to the poor old chicken?
- Cooking up some African superfoods. No insects (or chickens) were harmed in the making of this article.
- Yeah but who will be doing the cooking?
- And where to get the seeds? Maybe African Seed Access Index will help, though I somehow doubt it. At least for baobab.
- Oh well, there’s always beer I guess. (Though even that you can’t take for granted these days.)
- Or mead, at a pinch.
- I bet the Sumerians put a pinch of cumin in their beer. And mead.
- What about Latin America superfoods, though? Bolivians put them in their school meals, that’s what.
- Maize was a Latin American superfood once. Having trouble in Africa now, though.
- Wait, what, there was a 2nd International Congress on Hidden Hunger at the University of Hohenheim last week? And all I got was this t-shirt? Any superfoods on the menu there, I wonder?
- CIP on how it deals with traditional knowledge.
- For example at the Potato Park. Where I’ll be next week, incidentally. Stay tuned… But again, I rather fear that blogging will be on the light side next week.
- CIP has come a long way since its first DG, Dr Richard L. Sawyer, who sadly just passed away.
- Modelling the effects of climate change on wheat. Again. Can never have enough data. Anyway, wild relatives the answer?
- Mongolian nomads settle down. And not in a good way.
- There’s more to sustainable cacao than productivity. Fortunately, some people are on that. Meanwhile, at the other end of the poverty spectrum…
- Don’t think I’ve ever seen a nerdy interactive map like Global Forest Watch go mainstream. Hope for us all. Mash it up with this next?