- Plants for Europe is (are?) incensed about new EU regulations. Should it/they be?
- Squash is a Native American word, natch. I bet they’re incensed.
- Speaking of Native American crops, here’s a big writeup on the potato, including great pix, and nice shoutout for the CIP genebank.
- If you live in the tropics and want to learn about agroforestry, you could just go out and talk to the first smallholder you meet. Or you could read a textbook.
- A roundtable on whether genetics can help us figure out whether wine is good for you. When they do the large scale clinical trial, as they surely must, I’ll be first in line.
- The breakthroughs of agriculture. Sadly, working out the seed viability equation does not feature. Nor does vegetarianism.
- Breeding does, though. And here’s an example why, featuring soybeans.
- And another from rice: IRRI bags another silver bullet gene.
- And we’ll soon have those in cotton too.
- Which is all fully recognized in the latest WRI report on how to feed the world.
- Though not in this other mega-report on Brazil, at least not quite so explicitly.
- “We need more research” is the wrong answer. Even when it’s breeding?
Nibbles: Innovative farmers, Feed resources, Sweet potato biscuits, Vegetable pests & gardens, Rooting for tubers, Kew collecting, Seed systems, Jess Fanzo, Blogging, Wild foods, Perennial crops, Ghana cacao, Sugar book review
- Oh, bloody hell, you mean there’s an International Farmer Innovation Day, and it was yesterday? I suppose agroecology is a form of farmer innovation? And here you can hear the very voices of innovative farmers.
- Sometimes farmers don’t innovate enough.
- And sometimes they need a helping hand from the media. Or ACIAR. Or WFP.
- Sometimes, though, they just go it alone, ploughing a lonely furrow like Rhizowen Radix.
- Kew seed bankers visit the Caribbean. Nice gig if you can get it. Any CWR?
- Wonder if they’ve read CTA’s new dossier on seed systems. Start here.
- The Jess & Jeremy Show goes on the road. All food security and nutrition, all the time.
- Is this why Jess blogs?
- I wonder if Jess would agree with Jo Robinson on wild foods. Probably.
- Whatever, as long as it’s perennial!
- CIAT gets its climate-smart cacao work in Ghana into The Economist.
- Well of course you need sugar in your cocoa.
Scaling up everything except communications
Scale is very much on the agenda today in Africa, though a little bit under the radar, for some reason. We’ve seen no advance publicity, for example, for the launching of the the African Plant Breeding Academy by the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC). We were insufficiently attentive, no doubt. Here’s the press release. And you can follow the proceedings live from the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi. There is also tweeting:
Cabinet Secretary Kosgei: Scientists should take advantage of the academy for improved food security #orphancrops http://t.co/ORHbRpu4wX
— CIFOR-ICRAF (@CIFOR_ICRAF) December 3, 2013
You’ll remember that the African Orphan Crops Consortium plans to use next-generation technologies to sequence dozens of heretofore neglected crops and use the resulting megadata to improve them. Good luck to them.
Meanwhile, a little further north, another CGIAR Centre is hosting a meeting of Feed the Future’s Agriculture & Nutrition Global Learning and Evidence Exchange, a meeting which is apparently focusing on scaling up technology adoption. I found out about it via the redoubtable comms people at ILRI:
@ILRI Addis today hosts @FeedtheFuture GLEE on scaling up adoption and use of agricultural technologies. http://t.co/5kuVH3UXZd@agrilinks
— peterballantyne (@peterballantyne) December 3, 2013
But further information is very scarce. Maybe a participant will fill us in. In particular, of course, we’d be very interested in what is being said about the use of agricultural biodiversity in scaling up nutrition interventions.
Nibbles: ICRISAT award, SIRGEALC awards, Food etymology, Black carrot, Bolivian potatoes, NASA weirdness, Mexican maize, Rice 2.0, Vaccinium
- Dr Upadhyaya Goes to Tampa.
- SIRGEALC participants get prizes too. Maybe one of them can tell us about it.
- First uses of various food words.
- Punjab Black Beauty set to take the carrot world by storm.
- Bolivia conserves its potato relatives. When will it ratify the ITPGRFA and share the love?
- NASA going to grow plants on the Moon. What could possibly go wrong.
- Free trade apparently threatens maize and Mexican culture. I personally think both can take it. They’ve been going for a while.
- You know, I just have no idea what this silly piece about rice in Africa is trying to tell me. Maybe you can figure it out and let me know.
- Celebrating the cranberry.
You say Kartoffel
Let’s be fair. The inability to distinguish the potato from other Andean roots and tubers is not entirely confined to National Geographic. Take, for example, the November 2013 edition of the German magazine P.M. History. I don’t think it is online, but there’s an article in there entitled “Eine kleine Knolle verändert die Welt,” or “A small tuber that changed the world.” The first couple of pages are reproduced here. Clearly, it’s about the potato.
Ah, but wait, for a little further on one comes across a photo of what are clearly not potatoes. Unless of course all is explained in the caption, but somehow I doubt it.