- Cultivate medicinal trees to save them. Oh, and provide medicines.
- Or you could harvest them sustainably from sacred forests?
- Reef fished out? Aquaculture to the rescue. Sounds a bit like the aquatic equivalent of the above, no? But do they have sea cucumbers and their poop in those inland ponds?
- Growing diverse crops good for bees, good for crops. Buckwheat diverse enough for ya?
Nibbles: Pretty, Peak soil, Wine history, Ancient foodways, Offal, Durian, Exotic plant foods, Cassava, Mozzarella, Nutrition report, Superfoods
- Jules Pretty meditates on the impermanence of things.
- Like soil. And bumblebees.
- Ah, well, let’s not get maudlin. Pass the bottle. Well looky here. The French got wine from the Italians. I feel better already.
- And Canadians had clam gardens a thousand years ago. Probably still do, actually.
- Along with offal, no doubt. Which did not, however, seem to play any role in a recent Mesolithic dinner. Though French wine did. Which is weird.
- The best fruit in the world gets the Kew treatment.
- And is included in a weird list of the 100 weirdest food plants.
- Cassava‘s pretty weird too.
- The best cheese in the world is not French either.
- All of which foods no doubt feature in FAO’s new report on nutrition. Which is really important, so don’t let the flippancy fool ya. The Lancet agrees. And you can do your bit too.
- Ah, but does quinoa feature in that FAO report? The backlash continues…
The purple breadfruit of Tamotu
I really hope the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of the Solomon Islands won’t mind me reproducing this snippet on a cool breadfruit variety from the province of Temotu, courtesy of the April issue of their monthly electronic newsletter, Agrikalsa Nius. 1
Brainfood: Urban German grassland, Urban Flemish gardens, Totally wild beans, Inter-specific Vigna crosses, Vietnamese cattle, Sustainable intensification, Gender, Oak seeds
- Urban land use types contribute to grassland conservation: The example of Berlin. And perhaps also to CWR conservation?
- Garden management and soil fertility in Flemish domestic gardens. Little about their diversity, though, alas.
- Drought Tolerance in Wild Plant Populations: The Case of Common Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Greater ecological amplitude than the domesticate.
- Introgression of productivity and other desirable traits from ricebean (Vigna umbellata) into black gram (Vigna mungo). It ain’t easy, but may be worth the effort.
- Assessment of genetic diversity and population structure of Vietnamese indigenous cattle populations by microsatellites. Some traditionally recognized breeds are close enough genetically to be conserved as a group.
- Ecogeographic survey and gap analysis of Lathyrus L. species. Only 6 of 36 species are adequately represented in genebanks.
- To close the yield-gap while saving biodiversity will require multiple locally relevant strategies. Location, location, location.
- Co-evolution of landscape patterns and agricultural intensification: An example of dairy farming in a traditional Dutch landscape. And here’s an example.
- Gender and Agricultural Innovation in Peasant Production of Native Potatoes in the Central Andes of Peru. And I suppose this is another, in a way.
- Ecological significance of seed desiccation sensitivity in Quercus ilex. Drying causes mortality. Could be used to predict response to climate change. In other news, oak seeds are recalcitrant.
Seeds for Needs in India
Seeds for Needs is a series of projects aimed at getting diverse material into farmer’s hands so they can assess it for themselves and decide whether and how they want to make use of it. An interesting twist on the idea is to harvest the results from hundreds of farmers and make greater sense (and use) of all that information. Now here’s a little video from Bioversity International about how things are going in India.
The growth of the farmer network, from 50 to 500 in a year, is fantastic, although I can’t help thinking that Jacob van Etten is still dreaming of hundreds of thousands of participants in his grand experiment in crowdsourcing.