- Domesticating fruit trees for food and profit. But why the “scare quotes” around clone?
- Indians 101: Northern Plains Agriculture.
- A different kind of weedy wild relative; feral rice.
- Great, innovative agricultural scientist? Prizes await you.
- Mexico’s corn festivals celebrate diversity – but why bring opposition to GMOs into it?
- Project to help the people who created and manage the Ifugao rice terraces to cope with climate change. Stay tuned.
- Project to “diversify … diets to improve nutrition and incomes in Bangladesh”. Stay tuned.
- And countries of the Pacific look to crop diversity to manage climate variability. Stay tuned.
- Can a farmer commit patent infringement just by planting soybeans he bought on the open market? Good question; stay tuned.
Two things about agricultural biodiversity
If the point of a good blog post is to get you thinking, Alan Cann’s over at the Annals of Botany blog certainly worked on me. What are the two things you need to know about a subject? I’ve been pondering that since 18 March, when Alan’s post appeared. I had my answer almost immediately, but I haven’t been able to refine it as I thought I might.
A bit of background. Alan was riffing on an article in The Guardian, which in turn was building on a site kept (and now more or less abandoned) by economist turned screenwriter Glen Whitman. The basic idea is that
For every subject, there are only two things you need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.
So what are my two things?
- All intrinsic improvements in agriculture are founded on existing agricultural biodiversity.
- Improvements in agriculture intrinsically destroy existing agricultural biodiversity.
But I’m sure you can do better …
Nibbles: Cannabaceae revisited, Farmer information, Sunflower genes, Urban foraging, Plant hunters, Forest gardens
- Hoping and doping: taxonomy of hops revised.
- What do farmers want? Where do they look for it? How much will they pay? IFPRI has answers.
- Van Gogh’s sunflower mutants explained.
- Gathering in the city: an annotated bibliography and review of the literature about human-plant interactions in urban ecosystems.
- Career advice: Plant Hunters.
- Coffee forest gardens improve food security.
Nibbles: Chicken feeds, Speech, Duck breeds, Information
- Watching hens eat – and gaining insights into food production.
- EU Commissioner for Environment explains the importance of biodiversity in agriculture.
- How to choose a duck breed for your farm.
- More money for the Biodiversity Heritage Library. They’re on Flickr too.
Nibbles: Goats, Seed Fairs, Banana genebank, Prunus africana plans, Forage grass, English food, Talking heads
- USAID and partners to probe African goat breeds for performance measures.
- FAO sings the praises of its seed fairs in South Sudan.
- Bioversity’s banana genebank gets a big write-up.
- Prunus africana, the aged gentleman’s friend, could also be the Kenyan farmers’ friend. In about 40 years time. If we start now.
- And speaking of domestication, efforts to tame Panicum turgidum as a new forage grass are under way.
- It wasn’t industrialisation that made English food bad, no matter what a Nobel Laureate may think.
- All that #abdchat, just in case you missed it live.