- Move over Juan Valdez. Cacao farmers want to emulate a marketing icon.
- Urban agriculture not all it’s cracked up to be. Living up to that urban ag icon, Cuba, is hard.
- Bali’s iconic, traditional subaks are a complex adaptive system, and much better than modern rice farming alternatives. Makes you wonder why they need protecting, though.
- GM bananas will save us. Not by themselves they wont. I don’t know why I keep linking to this stuff. Nothing at all iconic about it.
- Iconic taxonomic revision tools online.
- Something else that’s online is a bunch of tools for analyzing genebank data. Soon to be iconic, no doubt. As soon as people use them. So get cracking.
- Huge BBC documentary on Kew coming up. I bet the iconic Millennium Seed Bank will feature.
- Speaking of iconic genebank buildings, today’s one comes from Australia.
- The history of an iconic Middle Easter tree?
- The philosophy of an iconic Italian delicacy. Well, Neapolitan, really.
- And in honour of the World Cup (I refuse to put FIFA in front, let them sue me), an iconic Brazilian dish. And don’t worry, those beans are safe. Somewhere iconic.
Nibbles: Genomes galore: beans, sheep, citrus, Breeding from “weeds”, Talks, Old wheat, Adaptation, Popped sorghum, Managing BXW
Can’t move for genomes today.
- First off, Phaseolus vulgaris.
- Next up, sheep: one genome, three stories:
- And citrus diversity: “Citrus has incestuous genes. Nothing is pure.”
But there is other stuff too.
- How weeds could feed billions. Not by eating them but by breeding from them. Are crop wild relatives really all weeds?
- TED talks on biodiversity. I suppose we should be grateful for 1.5 out of 30.
- A New York baker has been exploring tumminia wheat. Without telling us.
- Adaptation to climate change hardly worth it, according to econ 101.
- So you want to make your own popped sorghum? All you need is a microwave and a paper bag.
- ProMusa reports on an easier and better way for banana farmers to manage Xanthomonas wilt.
Nibbles: Neolithic farmers, Minoan DNA, Cretan food, Olive history book, Organic dreams, Fairtrade experiment, Value chains, Jamaican breadfruit exports, Climate smart successes
- Neolithic farmers spread into Europe by sea.
- And it looks like the ones who got to Crete eventually gave rise to the Minoans.
- And ate food not unlike what Cretans ate up to a hundred years ago.
- Well of course the olive is important to all that.
- Ten thousand years later, we find that organic is an impossible dream.
- And Fairtrade may or may not work.
- But value chains will make you free. Although that’s easier said than done.
- And you have to be climate-smart to boot. Really, who’d be a farmer, in the Neolithic or now.
Nibbles: De Schutter, Madagascar beans, Beer!, Cocktails!, CIAT strategy, Segenet, FGR, Risotto again, Domestication, Quinoa, Medieval workplan, Late blight
- “Productivism” skewered one last time. Until the next time.
- The Malagasy Bean Renaissance. No, really.
- The science of beer foam. Now there’s no excuse.
- Cocktails can be biodiverse too. You bet they can.
- CIAT’s new strategy makes a splash. Genebank front and centre.
- New ICIPE director tells all. She used to work at CIAT, did you know?
- First edition of The State of the World’s Forest Genetic Resources is out. Now to do something about it.
- Italy’s traditional rices preserved. Yes, Italy’s, you heard me.
- Agriculture was invented in the current interglacial. Why then, and not in the Eemian?
- Quinoa macronutrients exzzzzzzzamined.
- Your what-to-do-now guide to the medieval farm. Progress? Not what it’s cracked up to be.
- People of the Toluca valley! Expect researchers looking for wild potato genes resistant to late blight.
Nibbles: Seed drying, Yield gap trap, African fermentation, Rice & temp, Cultural exchange, Youth, Syria and ICARDA
- How to keep seeds dry. Don’t do this at home, folks! No, wait…
- Don’t get trapped in the yield gap, researchers told.
- Diana Buja breaks down banana brewing.
- Night temperatures cross important threshold for rice.
- Cultural change does not have to mean genetic erosion and loss of agrobiodiversity knowledge.
- Getting youth back into agriculture. Not just about the money.
- Latest from the tragic ICARDA situation