- After yesterday’s thing on gum arabic, CIFOR’s blogger weighs in on frankincense and myrrh. Gums and resins renaissance, anyone?
- VoA on the ITPGRFA, with interview goodness.
- Soy sauce in bullet points.
- A Spanish food historian’s deconstruction of the Mediterranean diet deconstructed by Rachel Laudan.
- Fish in paddies: here comes the science.
- Côte d’Ivoire to revive cacao cultivation. By building a research centre?
- Pleasant, cultured and not so short foray into the history of the sugar industry in Kenya and Mauritius.
- You say sweet potato. I say yam.
- You say yam, so does Rhizowen, and yet … he’s talking about neither Ipomoea nor Manihot.
- Urban agriculture thriving in DR Congo.
Nibbles: Pest management, Pest management, Small-scale farmers, Food fair, USDA stats
- Community management of pests is less efficient (in Spanish). Something to do with farmers not sharing information quickly enough.
- Birds help to control vineyard pests.
- Small-scale farmers can feed the world, as any fule kno.
- Smithsonian celebrates urban ag. Meh.
- Organic food festival Dec 16th, Ahmedabad, India. “The food items should necessarily involve use of indigenous varieties”.
- USDA stops counting sheep. And goats, catfish and hops, among others.
Nibbles: Palestinian genebank, PNG seeds, Local chickens, Landscapes
- New seed bank on West Bank. This one seems to be a genebank. I think.
- Seeds and needs in PNG.
- ILRI PowerPoint on Ethiopian chickens. But 46 slides?
- Everybody’s talking about the new Landscapes for People, Food and Nature thing, so I guess we should too.
A tale of three cucumbers
You may remember my post of a few days back about the request on IdeaConnection for cucumber germplasm resistant to nematodes, Fusarium, CGMMV, downy mildew and cold, for a finder’s fee of $2,000. I did a few genebank database searches and didn’t get very far at the time, but a comment from the curator of the cucumber collection at CGN sent me back to their website because I had missed this crucial bit:
Searches can be made based on passport data and characterization / evaluation data or both. Only a selection of traits is on-line searchable, however all data are downloadable.
It turns out that the downloadable evaluation data for cucumber includes 3 experiments on downy mildew and one on Cucumber Green Mottle Mosaic Virus (CGMMV). So I got the Excel files and cross-searched them for material resistant to both diseases. The result is three accessions: CGN19618 (Taiwan), CGN21584 (India) and CGN22272 (Japan). The first two even have georeferences. The Japanese accession doesn’t, alas, but that would be my choice of the three for cold-hardiness. It’s a pickle obtained from the Know You Seed 1 seed company. That’s three out of the five traits. I think that’s worth at least a thousand bucks, don’t you?
Nibbles: Fish blog, El Guardabosques, Andean crops, Traditional knowledge
- WorldFish director has a brand new blog with a fancy Latin tag. Expiscor: to fish out, to find out, and discover.
- Cuba boasts home-grown Guardians of the Forests.
- Promotion of Andean Crops for Rural Development in Ecuador. No idea what this is or why it popped up now, but worth sharing anyway.
- Bioversity shares slides on The role of agricultural biodiversity in diets in the developing world: Improving diet diversity, quality and ecosystem sustainability.
- IIED comes out for traditional methods to cope with climate change. Could we abandon this sterile dichotomy, please?