- The next big livestock thing is swimming pigs.
- Or maybe llamas. Not swimming ones, mind, settle down.
- Nope, it’s farmed fish. Which do swim, though not very far.
- Meanwhile, Cornell re-engineers broccoli.
- And HarvestChoice puts out an African atlas. Online resources coming in due course.
- Which does not show you sesame cultivation in Ethiopia, alas, at least not yet, let’s wait for the online version.
- Speaking of atlases, RTBMaps is in Beta. I’ll have to play with it and get back to you.
- New Zealand changes genebank rules to speed up forage breeding. To do with quarantine rather than ABS, though.
Brainfood: Leafy greens, Korean rice, Molecular breeding, Poultry conservation, Tree genomes, Pathogen genetics, Grazers and CC, Sustainable rangelands, Available land, Ecosystem services
- Analysis of urban consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for African Leafy Vegetables (ALVs) in Kenya: a case of Eldoret Town. An 80% premium! But in Eldoret. And Nairobi?
- Analysis and comparison of the γ-oryzanol content based on phylogenetic groups in Korean landraces of rice (Oryza sativa L.). Some groups are browner than others.
- What is the SMARTest way to breed plants and increase agrobiodiversity? Just another name for MAS. But some crops are SMARTer than others.
- Conservation of local Turkish and Italian chicken breeds: a case study. Turks can learn from Italians. And probably vice versa, I bet, although that’s not explored as much here.
- Open access to tree genomes: the path to a better forest. Hard to argue with. The open access bit more than the genomes bit.
- Evolution, selection and isolation: a genomic view of speciation in fungal plant pathogens. Know your enemy. Easier to figure out how new species become different than how they stay that way.
- Long-Term Climate Sensitivity of Grazer Performance: A Cross-Site Study. Hotter conditions means poorer forage quality means smaller bison. And maybe cattle. All other things being equal, like genetics, and range management. Which of course they never are.
- Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3-year continental-scale field experiment. See what I mean? And more.
- Estimating the world’s potentially available cropland using a bottom-up approach. Less than you’d think.
- Spatial interactions among ecosystem services in an urbanizing agricultural watershed. Very very limited places provide multiple services, especially crop production and water quality, which means you need to protect huge areas. But they’ll be mosaics.
Nibbles: Sustainable aquaculture, Mekong fish project, Peruvian anchovetas, Ugandan fishing standards, Bangladesh fish celebrations, Beef vs fish, FAO on GIS
- Sustainable fish farming in Spain. With video goodness.
- A project to estimate the value of Mekong fish.
- Eating fish, rather than feeding them to pigs, to conserve them in Peru. The fish, not the pigs. And more on the same fish, but another place. I think it’s the same fish anyway.
- Codex Alimentarius standards are important even to Ugandan artisanal fisherfolk. Also with video goodness.
- It’s National Fish Week in Bangladesh.
- “So should we mourn that the cow is overtaken by the fish?”
- Fish need GIS too.
Brainfood: Phenology & CC, Potato nutrition, Buckwheat honey, Visitors in parks, Urban gardeners, Introgression from wild sheep, Catholic conservation, Tomato domestication
- Herbarium specimens reveal the footprint of climate change on flowering trends across north-central North America. 2.4 days per °C.
- Carotenoid profiling in tubers of different potato (Solanum sp) cultivars: Accumulation of carotenoids mediated by xanthophyll esterification. 60 cultivars, including landraces, fall into 3 main groups. Need to keep an eye out for those xanthophyll esters.
- Buckwheat honeys: Screening of composition and properties. In other news, there is monofloral buckwheat honey in Italy and E. Europe. But not as much as the producers say.
- Using geotagged photographs and GIS analysis to estimate visitor flows in natural areas. Very cool, but try as I might I cannot think of an application in agricultural biodiversity conservation. Maybe you can.
- Quiet sustainability: Fertile lessons from Europe’s productive gardeners. Food gardening in Europe’s cities is not about an “urban peasantry” putting essential food on the table. And it’s not about expousing a yuppie alternative lifestyle. It’s just about the sheer fun of it.
- Introgression and the fate of domesticated genes in a wild mammal population. Coat colour polymorphisms in wild Soay sheep was caused by admixture with more modern breed 150 years ago.
- Catholicism and Conservation: The Potential of Sacred Natural Sites for Biodiversity Management in Central Italy. So apparently there’s a “common view that Christianity is anti-naturalistic.” Well, it’s wrong. What’s Christianity’s view of agrobiodiversity, I wonder?
- Comparative transcriptomics reveals patterns of selection in domesticated and wild tomato. DNA differences due to selection at 50 genes, transcription differences at thousands.
Nibbles: Indian farmer, Indian farming landscape, Guatemalan protected areas, Old phones, Geo-data, HarvestPlus funding, Cavia, Agronomy, Bee bank, De-extinction
- Bhogpur farmer Subash Chander Misra gets Plant Genome Savior Farmer award 2012 for pear conservation.
- While a whole farming system gets protected in Kerala.
- Hope it doesn’t go the way of protected areas in Guatemala. Maybe they need old mobile phones. Or a better roads or urban expansion dataset. Or maybe just their own maps.
- UK government puts money where mouth is with grant to HarvestPlus. For things like this from ICRISAT. And have you seen the BBC slideshow?
- Funnily enough, nobody talking about guinea pigs as a solution for malnutrition.
- How Australian agriculture improved its water use efficiency. Clue: it’s not one thing. Good to be reminded, yet again, that’s it’s not necessarily always and only about the diversity. Keeps us centred.
- Bees get a bank?
- The de-extinction debate rumbles on. Centred, did someone say?