- Don’t deny the warmest 12 consecutive months in the US.
- Don’t think you can eradicate invasive species by eating them.
- Don’t think the dustbowl was only about dust.
- Don’t rely on mobile phones or radios for agricultural extension.
- Don’t train farmers to select their own climate-smart seeds.
Prospects for fish (and other) farming
The CGIAR Research Program on Aquatic Agricultural Systems launched recently with this video of what research can do for poor families in Bangladesh, and yes, they’re big on agricultural biodiversity. All they need to do now is stop sea-levels rising …
Nibbles: Livestock, CWR, Extremophiles, Museum exhibits
- How livestock help feed the world.
- The latest CWR newsletter from PGR Secure.
- “…humans have inadvertently been probing the environmental envelope of carbon-based life for thousands of years simply by experimenting with pickling, salting, smoking, and refrigeration.”
- A better way for museums to preserve rice plants. In other news, museums interested in preserving rice plants.
Nibbles: Kenyan blog, Beer, CGIAR squared, Horse domestication
- And Kenya’s best agriculture blog is…Tracking The Scent! Congrats Kio Wachira!
- Drinking beer as an agricultural act.
- CRP4 needs a new name.
- Meanwhile, here’s another example of CGIAR centres working together. Not clear if it’s in a CRP, though, and if so what it is called.
- Horse domesticated once, but with occasional restocking.
Is there more than one TME 419 cassava?
The TME 419 cassava that I Nibbled about earlier today has been making quite a splash in both DR Congo and Nigeria. Question is, is it TME 419?
Those who know about such things will recognize TME as an IITA genebank number. And indeed, if you look it up either on Genesys or IITA’s genebank database, you land on a Togolese landrace called Gbazekoute. Unfortunately, that doesn’t look anything like the TME 419 described in IITA’s Improved Cassava Variety Handbook. 1 There, TME 419 is indeed a Togolese landrace, but with the following characteristics: 2
Compare that with the description in the IITA database. Is the shape of the leaf’s central lobe lanceolate or elliptic? Is there or is there not pigmentation on the petiole? Is the colour of the root pulp white/cream or yellow? And does it have a purple cortex or not? A discrepancy in one of these descriptors I might have understood, but it is clear to me that we’re talking here about quite different cassavas.
So I ask IITA: which one is the real TME 419? I mean the one making news in DR Congo and Nigeria.