- The perils of industrial agriculture‘s race to the bottom.
- Heirloom veg nuts play with gene jockeys and everybody wins.
- The roadside botanist, bananas and cassava biodiversity.
- Biodiversity can support a greener revolution in Africa; fine paper. Ignore the press release; it’s rubbish.
Nibbles: Gourd, Climate, Khasi, Diet, Mauka, Diseases
- Unusual uses for a gourd.
- CIAT says North Africa will suffer most from climate change. So it must be true.
- Food Festival in the Khasi-Jaintia Hills of Mawphlang in India.
- Forget the global poor and their hidden hunger. We’re not eating our fruit and veg either.
- Evangelinemay1 wants to know how to “bring back biodiversity to our agricultural crops“. Let’s all love-bomb her, shall we?
- Radix has mauka seeds! (He means anthocarps of Mirabilis expansa.)
- ILRI continues to decrease agrobiodiversity — of animal diseases.
Nibbles: Maasai, Arbutus, Yak, China, USA
- ILRI video on helping herders with that climate change thing.
- Nutritional composition of Strawberry tree fruits.
- The genetic history of the yak.
- Chinese food archaeology: noodles and fruits.
- Colonial food in early America.
Farmers spread with farming
I was going to attempt to read and comment on a recent paper in PLOS Biology myself, but fortunately smarter people than me, who understand the subject better, got there first. So all I need to do is point you to Razib Khan’s explanation of how recent DNA analyses confirm “tentatively” the idea that farming didn’t spread into Europe as a result of people imitating their neighbours. Instead, the DNA suggests that spread was:
[A] classic demic diffusion process. This is basically a very simple model whereby farmers with larger population growth rates expand into the “space” of hunter-gatherers.
Now to do the same with their crops and livestock?
Nibbles: Coffee rust, PECS, Agrofuels, Israel, Mayan farming, Cannabis breeding, Drought resistance
- Resistance to coffee rust found in India, though not clear where. Now for the hard part …
- Arguments for Payments for Ecosystem Services. Matt points to a conference in 2013, but where are the actual payments?
- “Rather than decrying development in India and China we should be strenuously objecting to agrofuels.” So lets distinguish agrofuels from biofuels.
- Today’s new genebank is in Israel. Bet there are some crop wild relatives in there.
- Those Mayans were boffo agricultural engineers.
- “Alcohol-free” cannabis. I don’t understand any of this.
- A gene associated with flowering time has alleles associated with a rainfall gradient. h/t Jacob. Cool.