- GRIN-Global comes to Portugal. That makes two.
- Eating fungi.
- Eating bugs.
- Eating Indian.
- Eating blueberries is good for you.
- Would you eat these funny-looking potatoes?
- Veg ink.
- Old grape seed in Israel.
- Old einkorn seed in England.
- Atlas of Living Australia to include phylogenetic data. Kew thinking along same lines too.
- Grasses can absorb organic N. With some help.
- “Today’s international scientific community is dominated by big mercenaries who change their teams’ research subjects to get on the cover of Nature.” But INRA isn’t like that, apparently, at least with regards to high-throughput phenotyping.
- Argentinian periurban farmers grow varieties they like to eat. Well, it’s good to have the data.
- Rounding up China and Brazil in African agriculture.
- Meanwhile, back home, famous rice terraces are being used to grow maize.
- SMTA 101.
Nibbles: Year of the Goat, Nutritional guidelines, Healthy diets, IK & conservation, Healthy orchards, Indian endemics trouble, CWR garden, NGS & food security, 3000 rice genomes at work, C4 rice, It’s economics stupid, US animal products map, Milk production history, Old Chinese cheese, Old Arabian seashells by the seashore, Gordon Bleu insects, African agriculture visions, Agroecology conference report, Smallholder diversity, Seed systems project, Supermarket farms, Toronto beer, Herbs factsheets, Ecosystems map, Contested Agronomy
Sorry about no blogging last week. Was watching sausages being made. Here’s a quick roundup of most of the stuff I would have Nibbled.
- But first of all, Happy Year of the Ram, everyone. No, wait…
- Brazil has the best nutritional guidelines.
- But Chad the best diet. Both are kinda ironic.
- Well, what can governments do about supporting healthy food preferences anyway?
- Folk knowledge vital to conservation.
- Well I never, say the East Timorese.
- Farming in a national park can be a win-win.
- Maybe even a win-win-win, if cider apples are involved.
- India’s endemic plants could be in trouble. Many crop wild relatives among them?
- Maybe they should do what the Royal Horticultural Society will be doing at the Malvern Spring Festival and make a garden with crop wild relatives. But then it won’t be the world’s first.
- Next generation genomics is this generation’s jetpack.
- No, wait, here’s that jetpack you’ve been expecting for so long… Well, more the first concept of the assembly instructions, really.
- We’ll get that jetpack before C4 rice, I expect. But we will get both.
- But of course it’s not all about production anyway.
- Squid is Rhode Island’s most lucrative animal product. Otherwise it’s mainly milk, in that part of the US.
- Maybe cheese was the Taklamakan’s. Three thousand years ago. And sea molluscs Saudi Arabia‘s. Five thousand years ago.
- When and where will insects be.
- “Large-scale investment in African agriculture and agribusiness, whether foreign, domestic, private, government-backed, or a combination of these, could pay a vital role in providing urgently needed financing, technology and markets, thereby assisting to ensure food security, contributing to poverty reduction and propelling agriculture-driven growth, with significant implications for achieving more inclusive growth.” Is that really all one sentence?
- Or maybe small-scale investment?
- How much investment in agroecology will there be, I wonder. Even after this report from last year’s FAO conference.
- Oh good, 75% of crop diversity still on small farms. Would that be 75% of the 25% remaining from the last century?
- What effect will the Integrated Seed Sector Development Project Africa have on that 75%, I wonder.
- The farm as a supermarket. Almost makes you believe in that 75%.
- The beery history of Toronto. Yes, Toronto.
- The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) has nutritional fact sheets on herbs.
- A great new global ecosystem map has the GIS nerds all excited.
- “Contested Agronomy 2016 is a conference about the battlefields in agricultural research, past and present.” Oh to have the live-tweeting gig. Hell, I’d do it for free. Wait, don’t I already do it for free? Hasn’t this whole Nibbles been about contestation in agricultural development?
And on that note, that’s all folks. Because this was such a pain to put together after a week’s hiatus, I’m going to leave it on the front page for a day or two before sending it to the Siberia of the sidebar. Oh and BTW, people. We want to reach 6,000 followers on Twitter, preferably before that jetpack arrives, so follow us already, and tell your hipster friends.
Wait, too needy?
Brainfood: Domesticating seaweed, Upland sheep, Using CWR, Breadfruit amino acids, Species modelling, Echinochloa review, Fermented foods, Buckwheat breeding, Biofortified millet, Weird Japanese chicken, Barley yield stability
- Seaweed cultivation: potential and challenges of crop domestication at an unprecedented pace. I for one welcome our new algal overlords.
- Recent advances in understanding the genetic resources of sheep breeds locally-adapted to the UK uplands: opportunities they offer for sustainable productivity. Lower susceptibility to Maedi-Visna virus, for example.
- Back to the wilds: Tapping evolutionary adaptations for resilient crops through systematic hybridization with crop wild relatives. The promiscuity of plants will save us.
- Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis): a source of high-quality protein for food security and novel food products. All 49 varieties tested have full spectrum of essential amino acids.
- Predicting changes in the distribution and abundance of species under environmental change. Distributions are not enough, can adapt some methods to look at abundance too. Oh, and intraspecific diversity.
- Barnyard millet — a potential food and feed crop of future. Decline in cultivation could be reversed due to nutritional quality and adaptability, but it won’t be easy.
- Inclusion of Fermented Foods in Food Guides around the World. The benefits should be better known.
- Discovery and genetic analysis of non-bitter Tartary buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum Gaertn.) with trace-rutinosidase activity. Wow, a non-bitter buckwheat found in Nepal! Should now be possible to produce some better-tasting improved varieties. Yeah but you know how long that usually takes…
- Breeding of ‘Manten-Kirari’, a non-bitter and trace-rutinosidase variety of Tartary buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum Gaertn.). Well I feel foolish…
- Higher iron pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum L.) provides more absorbable iron that is limited by increased polyphenolic content. High Fe is not enough.
- Characteristics of Egg-related Traits in the Onagadori (Japanese Extremely Long Tail) Breed of Chickens. It’s a “Special National Natural Treasure” of Japan and no wonder.
- Exploitation of yield stability in barley. It’s not really feasible to measure it accurately, and therefore select for it, but when you do, it seems hybrids are better at it.
Nibbles: Species modelling vids, Diverse farm, MAIZE, Maize, COP20, Scuba rice, Trad food, Siberian Svalbard
- A niche modelling course on YouTube.
- Diversify for better nutrition.
- Cool infographic for CGIAR’s maize work.
- Which doesn’t mention the 58 names of maize.
- Discussion on genetic diversity from the first day of the Global Landscapes Forum 2014, in Lima, Peru, during COP20. And more from same thing, scroll down.
- Scuba rice in Bangladesh.
- Supporting food traditions in Sudan and Oklahoma.
- More on that weird, unnecessary, Siberian seed vault.
Livestock mapping comes of age
For your information, we have been beavering away since then, collecting more recent and detailed sub-national livestock statistics and disaggregating these using a slightly modified modelling approach, and 1 km multi-temporal, Fourier-processed MODIS imagery from the University of Oxford. We hope in time to produce global coverage for the most important livestock species, and make these publically available, but we have focussed our initial efforts on poultry and pigs in Asia.
That was Timothy Robinson in a comment on a post of ours back in 2012, and he’s been true to his word. There was a paper last year ((Robinson TP, Wint GR, Conchedda G, Van Boeckel TP, Ercoli V, Palamara E, Cinardi G, D’Aietti L, Hay SI, & Gilbert M (2014). Mapping the global distribution of livestock. PloS one, 9 (5) PMID: 24875496)), and there’s a wiki for the data.
I suggested in my earlier post that it was possible to get the impression that a lot of different players were working in parallel, if not in actual competition, on livestock distribution mapping. If that was indeed the case, and perhaps it was just an impression, it all seems to have been resolved in the intervening couple of years, thank goodness. According to the wiki:
In a multi-partner collaboration centered on the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB-LUBIES), global maps of livestock distributions and production systems are being revised and updated.
Only fair to add that I landed on this via a blogpost on Vox, of all places, which has been getting quite a lot of attention on Twitter, for some reason. It seems to have escaped my early warning system last year.