- Wild Food, Prices, Diets and Development: Sustainability and Food Security in Urban Cameroon. Local wild foods are better, imported processed foods are cheaper.
- Genetic diversity of teak (Tectona grandis L.F.) from different provenances using microsatellite markers. In Brazil, that is. Lower than expected, therefore future breeding programmes should make more use of the most distinct provenances. But what about bringing some new ones in? Too damn difficult?
- Taxonomic identity of the Iranian diploid Triticum as evidenced by nrDNA ITS. Splitters were right.
- Plant management and biodiversity conservation in Nahuatl homegardens of the Tehuacan Valley, Mexico. Most diverse homegardens located near least diverse natural forest.
- Amenity enhancement and biodiversity conservation in Australian suburbia: moving towards maintaining indigenous plants on private residential land. It would need better laws.
- Food sovereignty: an alternative paradigm for poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation in Latin America. Economic poverty does not necessarily lead to biodiversity loss. But biodiversity loss does often lead to economic poverty.
- Species and hybrid identification of sturgeon caviar: a new molecular approach to detect illegal trade. SNPs can detect the low value, hybrid, aquacultured stuff with great accuracy. In other news, there are sturgeon hybrids.
- Malaysian Species of Plants with Edible Fruits or Seeds and Their Valuation. Over 500, of which about half wild.
- The impact of commodity price and conservation policy scenarios on deforestation and agricultural land use in a frontier area within the Amazon. Weak enforcement leads to more deforestation. And you need fancy maths to figure that out?
- Production and processing of foods as core aspects of nutrition-sensitive agriculture and sustainable diets. It’s no good producing diverse foods if you can’t store and process them.
Brainfood: Gaming landuse decisions, Natura 2000, Expressing pears, Medicinal rice, Agroforestry and conservation, Grasslands, Cotton diversity, Ancient cattle, Neolithic Balkans, Indian guar
- Gaming for smallholder participation in the design of more sustainable agricultural landscapes. Board game can be used to facilitate communal decision-making in landuse planning in the buffer zone of a Man and Biosphere Reserve. What’s not to like?
- Mixed effects of long-term conservation investment in Natura 2000 farmland. It has been good for some things, not so good for others. No word on how CWRs have fared.
- Microarray analysis of gene expression patterns during fruit development in European pear (Pyrus communis). They’re different to those of Japanese pear (Pyrus pyrifolia).
- Quantitative and molecular analyses reveal a deep genetic divergence between the ancient medicinal rice (Oryza sativa) Njavara and syntopic traditional cultivars. Njavara is a cryptic variant of traditional Kerala varieties.
- Relationships between Biodiversity and Biological Control in Agroecosystems: Current Status and Future Challenges. Management should aim to suppress pests while maintaining diversity of natural enemy guilds. Easier said than done, I suspect.
- Agroforestry and Biodiversity Conservation in Tropical Landscapes. Between agroforestry cause and conservation effect are a bunch of pesky assumptions. I wonder if gaming would help.
- Livestock grazing and biodiversity in semi-natural grasslands. It can be good. Just one paper in the proceedings of a recent major conference on grasslands.
- Genetic diversity and population structure in the US Upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.). Who needs wild relatives when you have diverse obsolete varieties?
- Morphological and genetic evidence for early Holocene cattle management in northeastern China. Archaeology and DNA suggest parallel domestication of cattle in China.
- Domesticated Animals and Biodiversity: Early Agriculture at the Gates of Europe and Long-term Ecological Consequences. For thousands of years the impact of agriculture in the Balkans was limited.
- Characterization of released and elite genotypes of guar [Cyamopsis tetragonoloba (L.) Taub.] from India proves unrelated to geographical origin. And?
Nibbles: Homegardens, Ancient grains, Homeless hens, Data data data, New maize, ICRISAT ambassadors, Wine microbes, India, Soil Day
- Emma Cooper blogs her ethnobotanical MSc dissertation on British homegardeners and their cool crops.
- If she’d done her work in Sweden, she’d have written about Ragnar Pettersson and his “treasure of Ardre.”
- The downside of backyard farming: homeless hens.
- International e-Conference on Germplasm Data Interoperability: Genebank Database Hell gets an e-conference. What could possibly go wrong.
- Apparently there’s a new way to search for agricultural bibliografic (sic) data.
- CIMMYT gets its maize out there.
- ICRISAT is not one to hide its light under a bushel either.
- Aussies to survey their yeasts and bacteria to improve winemaking.
- The problems of India: “It takes a particular brand of incompetence and neglect for decades of stellar growth to have no apparent impact on India’s sky-high levels of under-nutrition.” I bet Dreze and Sen didn’t include a food bubble. Hey, but that can be exported.
- Oh and happy World Soil Day! Thanks to it, and Jim Croft, I now know Australia has a sort of soil genebank.
Nibbles: EU rules, Squash, Potato, Agroforestry textbook, Wine for health, Ag history, Breeding stories, Food security reports, Talking to policymakers
- Plants for Europe is (are?) incensed about new EU regulations. Should it/they be?
- Squash is a Native American word, natch. I bet they’re incensed.
- Speaking of Native American crops, here’s a big writeup on the potato, including great pix, and nice shoutout for the CIP genebank.
- If you live in the tropics and want to learn about agroforestry, you could just go out and talk to the first smallholder you meet. Or you could read a textbook.
- A roundtable on whether genetics can help us figure out whether wine is good for you. When they do the large scale clinical trial, as they surely must, I’ll be first in line.
- The breakthroughs of agriculture. Sadly, working out the seed viability equation does not feature. Nor does vegetarianism.
- Breeding does, though. And here’s an example why, featuring soybeans.
- And another from rice: IRRI bags another silver bullet gene.
- And we’ll soon have those in cotton too.
- Which is all fully recognized in the latest WRI report on how to feed the world.
- Though not in this other mega-report on Brazil, at least not quite so explicitly.
- “We need more research” is the wrong answer. Even when it’s breeding?
Nibbles: Innovative farmers, Feed resources, Sweet potato biscuits, Vegetable pests & gardens, Rooting for tubers, Kew collecting, Seed systems, Jess Fanzo, Blogging, Wild foods, Perennial crops, Ghana cacao, Sugar book review
- Oh, bloody hell, you mean there’s an International Farmer Innovation Day, and it was yesterday? I suppose agroecology is a form of farmer innovation? And here you can hear the very voices of innovative farmers.
- Sometimes farmers don’t innovate enough.
- And sometimes they need a helping hand from the media. Or ACIAR. Or WFP.
- Sometimes, though, they just go it alone, ploughing a lonely furrow like Rhizowen Radix.
- Kew seed bankers visit the Caribbean. Nice gig if you can get it. Any CWR?
- Wonder if they’ve read CTA’s new dossier on seed systems. Start here.
- The Jess & Jeremy Show goes on the road. All food security and nutrition, all the time.
- Is this why Jess blogs?
- I wonder if Jess would agree with Jo Robinson on wild foods. Probably.
- Whatever, as long as it’s perennial!
- CIAT gets its climate-smart cacao work in Ghana into The Economist.
- Well of course you need sugar in your cocoa.