- C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
- Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
- I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
- There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.
Nibbles: Impact evaluation reviews, Coffee podcast, Pretty on sustainable intensification, Patient capital, Searching for species names, Searching in general, Palestinian agriculture, Korean Neolithic, Mesquite in Africa, CIMMYT-China, Banana trade, UK plant science, Breadfruit, Weed, Beans in Mexico, Macadamia, Organic Cali
- How to do impact evaluation. Required reading.
- Podcast on the history of coffee from Linn. Soc. Required listening.
- How to intensify agriculture sustainably. Meah.
- It may well involve patient capital though.
- This thing will look for all the species names in a piece of text or website. Bound to come in useful one of these days.
- How to use Google properly. And a vaguely agricultural quiz to see if you’ve been listening in class.
- Protecting ancient irrigation system on the West Bank.
- And finding the oldest agricultural site in East Asia.
- The good and bad side of Prosopis in Africa.
- CIMMYT in China.
- The banana as a weapon.
- Touring UK plant science sites.
- Mapping breadfruit to save the world.
- “Over 78 million Europeans (15–64 years) have tried cannabis…” Purely medicinal purposes, man.
- “We wanted to see how farmers are reacting to this global climate change…” Bean farmers, not cannabis farmers.
- If you’re at the Noosa Botanic Gardens, Cooroy, you can see rare macadamias. Yeah but can you smoke ’em?
- Organic seed systems in California. No, not cannabis, settle down.
HarvestChoice crop mapping gets the nod
Our friends of the HarvestChoice team at IFPRI have been busy. Hot on the heels of MAPPR, comes news that their Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM) will be used to produce a Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA), which will “reveal the ‘gap’ between the current average yields of farms and their maximum production potential.” Sounds very useful. We have blogged about SPAM before. I was particularly intrigued by this statement in the IFPRI post on the subject, though:
At a recent GYGA meeting in Naivasha, Kenya, Atlas collaborators—which include Jawoo Koo of IFPRI—comparatively reviewed two major crop distribution maps and announced that they would use the ones produced by an IFPRI model—the Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM)—as a basis for the Atlas.
It would be interesting to know what the other lot of crop distribution maps were, the ones that were found wanting. One of our earlier posts does try to get to grips with the taxonomy of crop mapping, not particularly comprehensively, it has to be said. So was it perhaps CIAT’s Crop Atlas of the World? 1 Or was it the dataset of Monfreda et al. (2008), “Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000”? Or something else that we missed at the time? Maybe HarvestChoice/IFPRI are too modest to say, but it would still be good to know the basis for GYGA’s decision.
Collecting manual for plant genetic resources updated and online
Collecting plant genetic diversity is one of those great fat handbooks essential for anyone interested in, er, collecting plant genetic diversity. New it’ll set you back USD230. What’s more, the information in that dead-tree edition is truly ancient, much of it dating back to before 1995. But here’s good news. A brand-spanking new (and almost complete) version is available for your online edification, and our very own Luigi Guarino remains one of its editors. Old information has been updated. New information has been included. The whole thing can be downloaded (and printed, if you must). What’s more, “the editors invite your comments”.
What are you waiting for?
Nibbles: Fork, Prairies, Cynodon, Clove, Impact, Amazon, Blog, Horse, Thyme, Mauritius, Dyes
- Slate puts a fork in, well, the fork.
- Gotta love the Prairies.
- Mysterious Cattle Deaths Caused by GMO Grass: not GMO, not particularly mysterious.
- Gotta love the Spice Islands.
- How scientists can extract impact from their
navel-gazingresearch. - Gotta love online mapping platforms.
- Another journal starts a blog.
- Horses in agriculture, and history.
- Gotta love za’tar. It’s about thyme.
- Sweeter than sugar. Mauritius goes for fair trade and diversification.
- Dying for batik.