- That old perennial perennial grains featured in a new online magazine.
- @gr0b10d1v3r$1ty: Password to a More Secure Agriculture. See what Fabrice did there?
- Five games that will revolutionise your understanding of agricultural economics. No, really. We particularly like Bohnanza.
- The botanist in the kitchen looks at leeks; be ready for St David’s Day 2014.
- Most Ancient Romans Ate Like Animals. Prize for most obnoxious headline about NUS?
- Looking forward to BBC R4 on insectivory next week.
- Bangladesh encouraging agricultural diversification.
- A plague of locusts, just in time for Passover.
- Daily Kos does a big number on women in agriculture. Worth a bookmark.
- And Kew does a number on castor oil seeds. Breaking Bad fans will want to read it.
- We haven’t linked to a genome study for ages, so let’s hear it for bamboo.
- One of a whole lot of presentations from the recent Bio-innovate conference in Ethiopia, courtesy of ILRI.
Cassava accessories in Oxford
The latest In Our Time sent me scurrying to the online database of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Gotta love a museum whose collection you can search using the keyword “cassava accessory.” I also liked the historic photographs of the Luo, several of which include agricultural biodiversity.
Nibbles: Cornish pasties, Rice and fish, Wheat breeding, Diatribe, Hops, Bean-To-Bar, Geographic indications
- Yes, because the world desperately needs a map of “handheld, filled snacks from around the world.”
- Paddies and aquaculture go well together. But didn’t we know that already? And wait, synergise is a verb?
- Article with interesting-sounding title about the use of IT to monitor wheat diseases has nothing to do with using IT to monitor wheat diseases.
- Oh that’s enough for today, I’m just not in the mood. As you might have noticed.
- No, wait, I feel better now. Ah, the restorative power of beer and genebanks.
- And of chocolate.
- Which does not feature among the first three African PGIs.
Nibbles: Fruit hunters, Organic interview, Hunger review, Jamaican seeds, Project evaluation, Horse domestication, Maize then and now, Impact studies, Seed kits, Amazon ranching, Habitat restoration, Native potato manual, SRI
- CBC documentary on collectors of fruit diversity. Anyone seen it?
- Matthew Dillon of Seed Matters on organic seeds.
- IFAD bigwig deconstructs Conway’s One Billion Hungry. Great summary of 400+ pages. Diversified farming systems are in there, kinda sorta.
- Jamaican bill calls on someone or other to “maximize internal intra and inter-species variation to boost benefits.” They need to fix the title too. It has something to do with the ITPGRFA.
- How to evaluate fisheries and aquaculture projects. Nothing in there about the importance of genetic diversity in these systems, or indeed their possible effects on the biodiversity around them.
- Sculptures of horses with tack from middle of Saudi Arabian desert may push date of domestication way back.
- Maize a staple, not a ceremonial condiment, in early Peruvian coastal civilizations. And also in Timor Leste for that matter. One does worry about those local landraces, though.
- Latest examples of impact of investments in agricultural R&D from EIARD. Includes African indigenous veggies!
- AVRDC sends vegetable seed kits to Mali. Including indigenous species, but apparently only improved varieties.
- Anthropologist goes to Amazon, learns not to look down his nose at ranchers.
- Millennium Seed Bank helping to restore Falkland habitats. That sort of thing can be a business, you know?
- Manual for the conservation and improvement of Chiloe’s native potatoes. Should have something similar for maize in Timor, eh? And African indigenous veggies too?
- You remember yesterday’s Nibble about SRI? Here’s more oil on the fire.
Which heath pea would that be?
Over at another place, I’ve been looking into the botanical confusion surrounding that essential of Roman cooking, mentuccia, which is not pennyroyal. And lest people are tempted to say, as they have before, “Get a life,” here’s another splendid example of the perils of common names. And these are in the same language.
Luigi noticed this strange website which is both touting the benefits of and seeking supplies of a plant it calls the heath pea. Why? Well, there are records of Scottish highlanders suppressing their appetites during hard times 1 by eating the heath pea’s tubers. The heath pea site helpfully provides loads of pictures and other information to help people identify the correct species. But here’s the thing. There are at least two plants that occasionally go by the name heath pea: Vicia ervillea and Lathyrus linifolius. Both are also sometimes called bitter vetch. And I certainly wouldn’t have known the difference had it not been for a blog post by one ferrebeekeeper, ‘fessing up to having got the two mightily confused.
Vicia ervillia is one of the founder crops, first domesticated in the Middle East all those years ago, and still cultivated there. But Lathyrus linifolia is the one the Scots should be looking for.
Doubly confusing, it seems that the Vicia causes lathyrism and the Lathyrus doesn’t. As it happens, we have an expert on Lathyrus and Vicia among our regular readers, and I don’t doubt that he’ll be along in just a second to sort things out properly.