- “I think you’re going to need different sheep.” In Wales, that is. (And different grasslands?)
- And new cattle in India, apparently.
- Another bunch of international agricultural research centres get together. Yeah, because the other lot are doing so well.
- I wonder if any of either lot will be going to this FAO symposium on NUS in Asia in a couple of weeks’ time. And no, I don’t know why we didn’t know about this earlier.
- On the whole, though, I think I’d rather be at the Purdue llama workshop.
- Or, at a pinch, this thing on the edible Alliaceae.
- Wait, there’s also a New Alliance to Increase Food Security and Nutrition. Not sure who’s invited to this party, but the “Rome-based agencies” seem to be the ones throwing it. (I guess this comes on the heels of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ annual symposium? Where’s a good summary of what happened there? Anyone? Ah, yes, Ian Scoones explains all.)
- One of those agencies wants to hear from you if you have experience of community “gene/seed banks.”
- Unclear if Seed Savers Exchange would qualify, but they have a bunch of peas out for the “community” to have a look at.
- These Indian award-winners would definitely qualify. Which is just as well as it seems the national genebank is up for sale.
- Meanwhile, botanic gardens get together to restore degraded ecosystems.
- The Bard’s plants. Well, some of them.
Kew doesn’t store seed only at the Millennium Seed Bank
The Livingstone Online website coming up pretty much out of the blue on my Facebook timeline a couple of days back reminded me that I had wanted to point to the online database of the Kew Economic Botany Collection, if for no other reason than that we haven’t done it before, and that the collection includes seed samples, not least a few collected on the good doctor’s expeditions. Then of course they went and posted something about the database on their blog yesterday. Anyway, we’ve talked about the potential value of museum seed specimens before. In particular, if you search for “sorghum seed” in this case you get (among other things) what is clearly a rather remarkable collection of material from Tanzania, sent to Kew in 1934 by the “Director of Agriculture.” Each seed sample is labelled with a local name. Wouldn’t it be great to go back and see if landraces with those names can still be found, and maybe even compare their DNA with anything that can be extracted from these old seeds?
Nibbles: Esquinas-Alcázar, Legumes, Neolithic, FAO data, Fisheries, Fish pix, Another old goat, Kew campaign, Bees
- Pepe gets a prize from a queen.
- The Princess of the Pea gives no prizes, though.
- Oldest farming village in a Mediterranean island found on Cyprus. No royalty, alas.
- The Emperor of Agricultural Statistical Handbooks is out. Oh, and the online source of the raw data has just got some new clothes.
- Fish are in trouble. Well, not all. Kingfish, queenfish, king mackerel and emperor angelfish all unavailable for comment.
- No royalty connected with these beautiful pictures of Asian fish either. Does a former Dutch consul count?
- Quite a crown on this wild goat.
- The Royal (geddit?) Botanic Gardens Kew’s Breathing Planet Campaign: The Video.
- ICIMOD on the role bees (including, presumably, their queens) in mountain agriculture.
Nibbles: Quinoa, Chilean landraces, Planetary sculptors, Offal, Eels, Grand Challenges in Global Health, ILRI strategy, Artemisia, Monticello, Greek food, Barley, Rain
- The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
- No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
- Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
- What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
- And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
- But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
- Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
- Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
- Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
- The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
- How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
- Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?
Nibbles: Tomatoes, CATIE, Community seed bank, Law, Dairy breeding, Indian probiotics
- Ruth deconstructs her local tomatoes.
- New Mexico State University reaches out to CATIE’s genebank.
- Montana gets a genebank.
- Long Cymie Payne UBerkeley lecture on international law and biodiversity.
- Milking the data.
- Speaking of milk, indigenous lassi probiotics isolated, sequenced and deposited in genebank.