- No bananas without soil nutrients.
- Perhaps the back story to the banana genome can fix that.
- Coupla big Moringa meets coming up in November.
- Britain goes for gold in the jumping-on-the-Olympic-bandwagon-to-solve-global-hunger event.
- And CEO of Cargill offers coaching: be flexible, try harder.
- Deforestation in Guatemala and Belize. I love it when I can see geopolitics from space.
- Help Kew digitise its diversity.
- FarmAfrica celebrates non-timber forest products in Tanzania.
- Which could be of interest to Tanzanian farmers who have experienced the future of climate change.
- Nepali farmers say they’ve been hit hard by climate change.
- But it is not the reason for the climb of the desert ceanothus.
- Americans about to embrace colourful potatoes. Aren’t they always?
- The 2013 Vavilov-Frankel Fellowships are now open. Apply here.
- Seth Roberts says “I want to take this! Harvard class on fermented food.” Me too.
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
Nibbles: Social CRP, Coconut genebank, Rice breeding, Conservation debate, Mongolian herders, American chestnut, Marine conservation
- CGIAR Research Programme on Roots, Tuber and Bananas gets a blog to go with its Facebook page and Twitter feed.
- Coconut clones? I don’t think so.
- Rice yield gene? I don’t think so.
- NY Times hosts a debate on conservation, and genebanks get a look-in.
- Mongolia’s reindeer herders get some advice.
- “My great grandfather’s legacy is something I grew up knowing and respecting, but my parents’ conservation ethic is something that I have always lived.”
- Marine reserves can be good for fish. And abalone?
Nibbles: Wild goat, Heirlooms, Queen’s garden, Baobabs, Bison demise, Friendly yeast, Peruvian potatoes, Saline rice
- Old goat redux.
- A really nothing piece in the Washington Post about heirlooms.
- This is more like it: take home the Queen’s heirlooms. Well, almost.
- Here’s a baobab truly worthy of a factsheet.
- It was international trade that wiped out the bison.
- Fundamentals of On-Farm Plant Breeding Course: The Video.
- Another use for yeast.
- The Parque de la Papa highlighted. But doesn’t say seeds are even going to Svalbard.
- Salinity tolerance in rice: in Goa, and at IRRI.
Nibbles: C4 rice breeding, Tomato genes, Fruit/nut wild relatives, Peruvian cuisine
- C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
- Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
- I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
- There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.