- Seed savers: everyone’s got an angle, from Seeds of Hope and Change to Seed Bank Bingo.
- Italian lemons enjoying a renaissance. In California, natch.
- India registers Assam farmers’ traditional rice varieties. In other news, rice water “is also used as shampoo, according to community elders”.
- US$9 million to “implement and evaluate four approaches” to controlling Striga in Africa. One day we’ll know.
- Denver Botanic Gardens does amaranth.
- Evolution of bearded pigs. Good to know. Good to eat?
- Bioversity banana team guest blogs at Annals of Botany. But surely they have a blog of their own. No, wait…
- Agriculture is bad for your health.
Brainfood: Soil, Seed aging, Organic sustainability, Yaquis, Garlic, Rice bean, Ethiopian livestock, Sweet potato intercropping, PES
- Long-term effect of tillage, nitrogen fertilization and cover crops on soil organic carbon and total nitrogen content. No till is better than conservation tillage.
- Catalase is a key enzyme in seed recovery from ageing during priming. It sure is. Good to know.
- Sustainable agriculture: A case study of a small Lopez Island farm. The authors conclude: “the need for future targeted nutrient inputs cannot be ruled out for sustainable long-term production”.
- Evolution of the knowledge system for agricultural development in the Yaqui Valley, Sonora, Mexico. They’re innovative, and diversity promotes agility.
- Changes in phenolic compounds in garlic (Allium sativum L.) owing to the cultivar and location of growth. Don’t hold your breath; only 10 varieties.
- Morpho-physiological and nutritional characterization of rice bean (Vigna umbellata). Now that’s what I call science; 30 varieties.
- Rural livestock asset portfolio in northern Ethiopia: a microeconomic analysis of choice and accumulation. Many, many factors come into play.
- Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.)-based strip intercropping: I. Interspecific interactions and yield advantage. Almost every intercrop improves yield and bottom line.
- Should payments for biodiversity conservation be based on action or results? A model says: “It depends.”
Nibbles: Bramleys, FAO vs Big AG, Biofuels, Honduras, Indigenous food
- Awesome apple tree awes impressionable TV reporter shock.
- Food fight!
- Food fight referee?
- Recent developments in the world of biofuels; CABI sorts the good, the bad and the indifferent.
- A blogger asks: “What is the appropriate mix of policies regarding agriculture in Honduras?“
- Watch a video on an indigenous food festival in Thailand by following instructions here. Note to film-makers: there are simpler ways to share a video.
Andean products on display
The Fifth Potato Festival is underway in the Surco district of Lima, Peru. It sounds like fun, but all the information about it online at the moment is in Spanish only. If you don’t read the language, and can’t be bothered fighting with the results of Google Translate, you can read a short piece on last year’s event in English. It’s actually about much more than just the potato. There are stands on a whole range of new Andean products:
…black quinoa, royal quinoa, red quinoa, quinoa sajama, maca, instant amaranth, instant cañihua, wheat, red corn, corn chullpi, bean mashco, barley mashco, black potato, white potato flour, etc.
Selling seed of orphan crops in Kenya
The latest episode of BBC’s Horizon programme deals with a number of things we’ve blogged about here before, for example soil mapping in Africa and biochar. But the payoff for us here is the last segment, which is on a Kenyan seed company called Leldet, which…
…now offers farmers the opportunity to buy different varieties of previously forgotten under-utilised seeds, more suitable for the area. They supply them in smaller quantities so farmers aren’t over reliant on one crop.
Watch it quick, because I don’t know how long it will stay on the site.