- “These young people can’t farm.”
- Let the people tap!
- Wolf sighted in Massif Central. France surrenders.
- Fascinating discussion of how much water farmers “use”.
- “Blueberries have some stiff competition”. From plums.
- Millennium Seed Bank hit by credit crunch.
Sick, but good
Eat plants because they are disesased? You gotta be kidding, right? Well, no, as we’ve talked about here before. And as Jeremy goes into in some detail over at Vaviblog. Know any more examples? Leave him a comment.
Seed Systems and Agrobiodiversity: The Book
The Dutch ambassador to Ethiopia in his opening speech stressed that a well functioning seed system is crucial for improving food security, increasing agricultural export, and conserving agrobiodiversity.
That’s one enlightened ambassador. He was launching a book, which you can download in its entirety: Farmers, seeds and varieties. Supporting informal seed supply in Ethiopia, edited by Thijssen, M.H., Zewdie Bishaw, Abdurahman Beshir, Walter S. de Boef.
Professor screws up on domestication?
I’m having a domestication research moment today, after reading an interview full of inaccuracies by a renowned professor (I won’t name names). After spotting two major screw ups in his logic and several outright wrong ‘facts’, I’ve decided to be more thorough and start digging into West African yam domestication and the process that leads to it.
Oh name names, Mathilda, please!
Incidentally, there’s lots of agrobiodiversity stuff, including on domestication and crop wild relatives, at the open-access journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications. Just found out about it at Cultural Landscapes.
Surfing for seaweed
I’ve been sick at home for the past few days with what the wife is pleased to refer to as a man-cold but I think is a middling form of bubonic plague: bad enough to keep me from getting out of bed, not bad enough to prevent me surfing the tubes. Anyway, it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time to follow links to your heart’s content. I won’t go into the details of how I got there, although it was actually rather fun, but anyway, for example, this evening I landed totally serendipitously, after quite a meander from something totally unrelated, on a website of genuine agrobiodiversity interest. It’s about Porphyra. This is a genus of red algae which is very important as food in Japan, where it is know as nori. The Japanese are big eaters of different sorts of seaweed. But Porphyra is the most widely consumed seaweed in the world, and is even farmed. I just had no idea that the stuff you wrap around sushi comes from one (ok, maybe two) particular species, and one so complicated to grow to boot. I wonder if it will all now go for biofuel.