History

Nibbles: Feed lots, Tom Wagner, Ag Game, Cereal maps, Climate change, All change, Bananas extinct?, Permaculture course, Criminal urban ag, IPRs and GMOs

Feed lots, from the ever-wonderful Nicola Twilley – is the first of our eye-openers.
Bifurcated carrots is hosting a PDF profile of Tom Wagner, prolific breeder of tomatoes and potatoes.
Katherine McDonald is keen on a farming simulator game. Games? Who has time? Maybe this weekend.
1969 maps of cereals in India. I’d love to see them updated. A project for …
… Jacob van Etten. He and Emile Frison say that “Harnessing Diversity by Connecting People is the Key to Climate Adaptation in Agriculture”.
On Dr Frison’s last day as DG of Bioversity International. So, farewell then …
… the banana. Pat Heslop-Harrison consulted by BBC’s The Food Programme. Here’s his take on Bananas and their future.
Cornell University is offering an online course in permaculture design.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the city planners in Los Angeles decriminalized urban agriculture?
Grist gets to grips with the locks that imprison GMO research – real and imaginary.

Quick catch-up after 10 days away edition. If I missed anything spectacularly important, it’s bound to resurface.

A baobab (not the baobab) in danger of extinction.
Could it be saved by attending a course on Contemporary Approaches to Genetic Resources Conservation and Use?
And if it’s courses you’re interested in, we have:

Agriculture nutrition linkages, also from Wageningen.
Agroecology – the Future of Farming?, from the College of Enlightened Agriculture at Schumacher College. Why the weaselly question-mark?
And a conference on domestication.

The value and use of social media as communication tool in the plant sciences deconstructed by AOBBlog.
AOBBlog also gives the “cunning culinarists” at Kew some stick on their 100 exotic edibles.
Personally, I’d quite like to try Dead Man’s Fingers.
And take a look at Kew’s new display of summer cereals.
I don’t see any mention, however, of lettuce as a sacred sex symbol, with added vocabulary-enhancing properties.
And speaking of manure, its use is almost as old as agriculture.
If I had a donut for every why-don’t-we-all-eat-insects article I’ve read, I’d be spectacularly overweight by now.
Big Picture Agriculture offers An Interview with Cornell’s Dr Erika Styger about the System of Crop Intensification (SRI-Rice).
Is watergrass (Echinochloa) a problem for SRI-Rice? I don’t know, but it supports Ford Denison’s argument about the speed of evolution in weeds …
… prompted by Carl Zimmer’s article on weeds in the New York Times.

The Brazil nut needs its pollinators.
How USDA protects plant varieties.
American dogs are Asian, not European.
~~India~~ Nepal working out how to implement the ITPGRFA.
Kerala’s vegetable terrace gardeners.
Haven’t heard much about Ug99 lately, have we? Doesn’t mean people aren’t keeping a careful eye on it.
Climate change 10,000 times faster than vertebrate evolution.
Why quinoa is not “taking over the world.”
Not even New Zealand. Though not for want of trying.
In the meantime, soybeans taking over Africa?
Aquaculture that’s sustainable and ancient. Includes taro fish ponds, which for some reason seem to me cool beyond measure.

Palau finds salt-tolerant taros.
Elsewhere in the Pacific, researchers try to revive bele. That would be aibika. Or slippery kabis. Or Abelmoschus manihot.
Which is a polyploid, isn’t it? Not to mention perennial.
Bound to be lots of Pacific stuff at the Society for Economic Botany’s meeting, going on NOW. No, wait, it’s ending today. Bummer.
Did you know that the first formal plant disease record in the Pacific region was from wheat, grown in Sydney by the first colonists? Well, I’m not entirely sure if that’s true, but it’s a way of introducing this blog on wheat in this Pacifically-themed Nibbles.
Agrikalsa Nius is the monthly electronic newsletter of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of the Solomon Islands.