- Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services documents examples of how indigenous people’s knowledge conserves biodiversity, including of the agricultural kind.
- The truth about frankincense and myrrh. Talk about traditional knowledge.
- Can global crop production meet future demands? The Story Map.
- What ICRISAT is doing about the above, from the horse’s mouth.
- Progress in Achieving and Delivering Drought Tolerance in Maize — An Update: “Germplasm collections are assuming greater importance if gains from native genes are to be sustained. Efficient and accurate field phenotyping remains essential for genetic progress.”
- Workshop in Field-based High Throughput Phenotyping. Next April, in Arizona, you maize people.
- A clone is a clone is… no wait.
- Root and tuber people already planning their next big shindig, in October 2015. Meanwhile, they’re getting down to work in the Pacific.
- AoB Blog on plant science on Facebook. Also on Facebook.
- Solanum expert Dr Sandy Knapp on the of Global Plants Initiative.
- Archaeological remains of agriculture found in Nuevo Leon are oldest for that Mexican state.
- Legumes (genera) of the world now online, thanks to Kew.
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.
Brainfood: Latvian tomato heirlooms, Sinai desert gardens, Orange silkworms, Indian pony breeds, Korean radishes, Anthophagy, Hybrids and diversification, Oregano oils, Chinese peanuts, Ethiopian sorghum, Wild rice crosses
- Latvia’s Tomato Rebellion: Nested Environmental Justice and Returning Eco-Sociality in the Post-Socialist Eu Countryside. The Man tries to enforce the European Common Catalogue, Latvians rebel.
- Traditional agricultural gardens conserve wild plants and functional richness in arid South Sinai. Wild plants survive in gardens, which thus combine diversity and utility.
- Analysis of a silkworm F1 hybrid with yellow cocoon generated by crossing two white-cocoon strains: Further evidences for the roles of Cameo2 and CBP in formation of yellow cocoon. What, are we expected to eat this thing now, what with its high carotenoid content and all?
- Genetic diversity and bottleneck studies in endangered Bhutia and Manipuri pony breeds. Bottleneck? What bottleneck?
- Analysis of the genetic diversity of radish germplasm through SSR markers derived from Chinese cabbage. New Korean radish varieties not same as old Korean radish varieties.
- Ethnobotanical study of anthophagy culture in mountainous area of Wenzhou. It pays to eat flowers.
- Enabling adaptation? Lessons from the new ‘Green Revolution’ in Malawi and Kenya. Adopting hybrids, and thereby escaping the “low maize productivity trap” is no guarantee that your thoughts will turn to crop diversification.
- Phytomorphological and Essential-Oil Characterization in situ and ex situ of Wild Biotypes of Oregano Collected in the Campania Region (Southern Italy). Both nature and nurture play a role. Look for high glandular and stomatal density.
- Diversity characterization and association analysis of agronomic traits in a Chinese peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) mini-core collection. Can it really be down to just 15 alleles?
- Assessment of molecular diversity and population structure of the Ethiopian sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] germplasm collection maintained by the USDA–ARS National Plant Germplasm System using SSR markers. High diversity, no structure, much duplication, little passport data.
- Crossability patterns within and among Oryza series Sativae species from Asia and Australia. Some easy, some difficult, all interesting.