- Yet another blog post about heirloom apples. Why not heirloom, I don’t know, grains?
- Yet another genebank opens.
- On the other hand, can never have too many agrobiodiversity songs.
- Banks? someone mention banks? Biodiversity hotspots are like (some) banks. Too big to fail.
- Even crop wild relative hotspots?
- 1491: Amazon.
- 1493: New England. Hope Charles Mann won’t mind me borrowing his tropes.
- Interesting use of technology to deliver interesting presentation on mainstreaming of nutrition in agricultural development. Anyone know how it was done?
Nibbles: ITK book, Golden Rice, Indian census, School meals, Camels, Fermentation, CC comms, Eel aquaculture
- The Guide for the Perplexed Entering the Maze of Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. Great title.
- IRRI DG blogs about Golden Rice on World Sight Day. In other news, there’s a World Sight Day.
- Indian farmers ever more marginal.
- If they were in Africa, they’d be producing nutritious school meals.
- Book on camel biodiversity.
- Turns out Jeremy is part of a movement that he apparently didn’t even know existed.
- Are you involved in the UNFCCC agriculture negotiations? You’ll need this handy communications tool-kit. Agricultural biodiversity is in there somewhere.
- Not sure that eels are, but maybe they should be.
Nibbles: Committee on Food Security, Nutrition for noodles, Gum trees, GBIF
- The Committee on World Food Security is meeting in Rome. If that’s the kind of thing that whets your appetite, follow #cfs40 on Twitter.
- Where, if it’s not too late, you’ll find me offering mouth-watering nutritional advice.
- Up a gum tree; ICRAF clones puffpo piece. Whatever happened to added value?
- GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — has a new portal. But is it a better portal?
- And you can watch GBIF’s Science Symposium 2013 live in just under 85 minutes, and counting.
Agrobiodiversity meta-calendar needed!
Yesterday’s Nibble scared me, I don’t mind admitting. So many meetings and other events going on, all over the world, all the time. What is a poor boy interested in agrobiodiversity to do to keep track?
Here’s what, since you ask. What we need is an app — or a real live human being, I don’t care — to regularly go through the following online calendars, extract the events of most obvious relevance to agricultural biodiversity, and plonk them on another, bespoke online calendar:
- CGIAR
- Young Professionals for Young Professionals in Agricultural Research for Development
- Global Donor Platform for Rural Development
- Agrifeeds
- Convention on Biological Diversity
Now, you tell me, is that too much to ask for?
LATER: Cédric makes some additional suggestions in a comment, but I only really like these two:
Nibbles: Evolution, Kimchi, Ancient date, C4FRC, US wine history, Fishing, Kew Cucurbita erection, Old wine, Orange cassava
- Enjoying a mango, lychee or cashew? Thank the Eocene-Oligocene glaciation.
- A grand tasting of Korean kimchi, in New York next week. #wishiwerethere.
- The “Methuselah date” continues to thrive. How soon before we have a comparative sequence? (We missed an earlier report.)
- You know what else is thriving? The Crops For The Future Research Centre, that’s what.
- The home state of US winemaking? You’ll never guess.
- Fishing myths busted. No, not the one about giving someone a fish vs providing capacity building in a piscatorial framework. Carpe carpam!
- Kew builds a pyramid! Of pumpkins, settle down.
- A well-aged wine to go with those cucurbits? How about this 6000 year-old Greek number? I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.
- Nice enough story of cassava improvement from CIAT, except that it is missing the beginning (the genebank?) and the end (blindness prevented).