History

April 19, 2015

A book worth waiting for

With our own hands

An old friend, Frederik van Oudenhoven, and his friend and colleague Jamila Haider, are deep in the proofs of what looks to be a wonderful book. With Our Own Hands “tells, for the first time, the cultural and agricultural history of the Afghan and Tajik Pamirs, one of the world’s least known and most isolated civilisations”. Should be a great read, with stunning photographs to accompany the local recipes, essays, stories and poetry. Better yet, generous donors are allowing 1800 copies to travel back to the Pamirs to be given to communities, schools, cooks and libraries.

If you’re interested, you should pre-order. Details here.

April 6, 2015April 6, 2015

Brainfood: Resilience and diversity, Cold tolerant rice, Old baobabs, VIR, Local adaptation, Prunus phylogeny, Bactris mating, Land use change, Wheat landraces, Amazonian agrobiodiversity

Does Plant Species Richness Guarantee the Resilience of Local Medical Systems? A Perspective from Utilitarian Redundancy. It depends on how knowledge is distributed.
COLD1 Confers Chilling Tolerance in Rice. From a wild relative.
Searching for the Oldest Baobab of Madagascar: Radiocarbon Investigation of Large Adansonia rubrostipa Trees. 1,600 years seems to be the record.
Genetic resources of cultivated plants as the basis for Russia’s food and environmental security. VIR needs Roubles 425 million a year ($14.3 million).
Using archaeogenomic and computational approaches to unravel the history of local adaptation in crops. Models say that adaptation to higher latitudes was rapid, simple (few genes) and unstable.
Combining conservative and variable markers to infer the evolutionary history of Prunus subgen. Amygdalus s.l. under domestication. Almonds and peaches were domesticated on either side of the Central Asian Massif from different sections of the genus that had been there for 5 million years.
Conservation implications of the mating system of the Pampa Hermosa landrace of peach palm analyzed with microsatellite markers. Bactris effective population size in genebanks is too small.
Global effects of land use on local terrestrial biodiversity. Within-sample total terrestrial species diversity down by 13.6% globally. About the same for crop wild relatives?
Exploiting genetic diversity from landraces in wheat breeding for adaptation to climate change. It would be a good idea.
Household Agrobiodiversity Management on Amazonian Dark Earths, Oxisols, and Floodplain Soils on the Lower Madeira River, Brazil. Age of household head, size of household and area of land under cultivation predict amount of agricultural biodiversity managed.

April 4, 2015April 2, 2015

Nibbles: Local earthworm, Public-private, Cassava double, Food prices, Amazonian rubber, Mongolian ag, Pacific roots, Potato CWR, Ugandan plantain, Galician brassicas, Contesting agronomy, Silver bullet

Lamb ham: an easter tradition we can all get behind.
Indian researchers market a new earthworm. Not to bring you down or anything.
PPP are the new black. It says here.
Cassava gets Big Data treatment. That’s kinda biotechnology too. But then you have to commercialize the stuff, right?
“Food price shocks are both a determinant and effect of conflict.”
Recognizing the “rubber soldiers”.
Chinese experts tell Mongolians how to be more resilient to climate change. I hope it works out for them.
New potato and sweet potato varieties for the Pacific come to CePaCT.
Any of those potato varieties benefit from wild relatives?
New plantain variety for Uganda.
Galician genebank gets old brassicas. National genebank unavailable for comment. Actually, national genebank unavailable.
“We can see the blinkered promotion and systematic ‘bigging-up’ of individual agricultural technologies, and their real or imagined impacts, as a direct result of the uncritical acceptance of the language of ‘impact at scale’.”
Biotechnologist says we need biotechnology to feed world. QED.

April 3, 2015March 31, 2015

Seeds of Time comes to Bonn!

April 2, 2015April 2, 2015

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?