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Nibbles: Feed lots, Tom Wagner, Ag Game, Cereal maps, Climate change, All change, Bananas extinct?, Permaculture course, Criminal urban ag, IPRs and GMOs

Feed lots, from the ever-wonderful Nicola Twilley – is the first of our eye-openers.
Bifurcated carrots is hosting a PDF profile of Tom Wagner, prolific breeder of tomatoes and potatoes.
Katherine McDonald is keen on a farming simulator game. Games? Who has time? Maybe this weekend.
1969 maps of cereals in India. I’d love to see them updated. A project for …
… Jacob van Etten. He and Emile Frison say that “Harnessing Diversity by Connecting People is the Key to Climate Adaptation in Agriculture”.
On Dr Frison’s last day as DG of Bioversity International. So, farewell then …
… the banana. Pat Heslop-Harrison consulted by BBC’s The Food Programme. Here’s his take on Bananas and their future.
Cornell University is offering an online course in permaculture design.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the city planners in Los Angeles decriminalized urban agriculture?
Grist gets to grips with the locks that imprison GMO research – real and imaginary.

The Lancet waxes optimistic on hunger and poverty goals.
Korea keen to help compile information on African livestock.
Is there nothing Jatropha cannot do? Now it’s a carbon sink.
Fijian ginger and Ethiopian beans; two value chains explored in the latest New Agriculturalist.
An International Symposium on Vegetables in August 2014, with lots of interest, but as it is under the ISHS you’ll have to pay to read about it.
“Temperature alters population dynamics of common plant pests.” Ya don’t say.
“Help a Bolivian farmer: Eat quinoa“. Now there’s a headline with attitude.

Grow your own delicious bugs for snacks. I feel duty bound to point out that the snacks in question are flies, not bugs. And where’s my donut?
This short film about the Svalbard seed vault is not nearly as scary as it’s poster image.
FAO hosts an expert workshop on perennial crops, for three days in August.
The ENDURE network – “diversifying crop protection” – says Danish farmers love Integrated Pest Management. And the Endure network.

Quick catch-up after 10 days away edition. If I missed anything spectacularly important, it’s bound to resurface.

A baobab (not the baobab) in danger of extinction.
Could it be saved by attending a course on Contemporary Approaches to Genetic Resources Conservation and Use?
And if it’s courses you’re interested in, we have:

Agriculture nutrition linkages, also from Wageningen.
Agroecology – the Future of Farming?, from the College of Enlightened Agriculture at Schumacher College. Why the weaselly question-mark?
And a conference on domestication.

The value and use of social media as communication tool in the plant sciences deconstructed by AOBBlog.
AOBBlog also gives the “cunning culinarists” at Kew some stick on their 100 exotic edibles.
Personally, I’d quite like to try Dead Man’s Fingers.
And take a look at Kew’s new display of summer cereals.
I don’t see any mention, however, of lettuce as a sacred sex symbol, with added vocabulary-enhancing properties.
And speaking of manure, its use is almost as old as agriculture.
If I had a donut for every why-don’t-we-all-eat-insects article I’ve read, I’d be spectacularly overweight by now.
Big Picture Agriculture offers An Interview with Cornell’s Dr Erika Styger about the System of Crop Intensification (SRI-Rice).
Is watergrass (Echinochloa) a problem for SRI-Rice? I don’t know, but it supports Ford Denison’s argument about the speed of evolution in weeds …
… prompted by Carl Zimmer’s article on weeds in the New York Times.