Information

September 27, 2011September 27, 2011

Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair off and running

The Second Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair will be an exciting and “out-of-the-box” event, offering participants creative and innovative learning and sharing opportunities, and equipping them with tools to better influence future rural development activities.

Here’s the homepage, with all the various ways of following developments. Though the live video feed is elsewhere. I just got this quote from Rob Burnet, who was talking about sharing the joys of chicken-rearing:

Information should be in a format such that when you hold your hand out, it’s snatched!

Snatch away.

LATER: IFAD lists the highlights. Interestingly, Sam Dryden‘s presentation yesterday of the Gates Foundation agricultural strategy doesn’t make the cut. Video to come, apparently. But here’s a summary, on page 2.

September 27, 2011September 27, 2011

Nibbles: Maize, David Douglas, Globesity, Iron-rice rice, Miracle berry, Trout vs cows

Farmer Brian Schaumburg has planted corn for five straight years in some of the thousands of acres he tends in central Illinois. Good thinking; it’s non-native, and it’s a monoculture.
Douglas of the Douglas Fir remembered.
Tom tackles “globesity“.
Enriching rice with iron and zinc using rice’s own genes. Because they can.
How Richadella dulcifica works its miracles.
In the contest between fish and bovine, the outcome is not always certain.

September 27, 2011

Sorghum and ethnicity in Africa

Ever since I contributed to A methodological model for ecogeographic surveys of crops, and suggested that collectors should do this, I’ve been waiting for the time when it would be easy — or even possible — to map the distribution of conserved germplasm on top of cultural, ethnic or language boundaries. The problem has been that maps of such boundaries, ¹ though available in various printed formats, have not been much digitized. Or at least I hadn’t come across them. Until I happened on a blog post about the Center for Geographic Analysis’ (Harvard University) WorldMap, an open source web mapping system. The layers provided include one called Ethnicity Felix 2001, which “consist of polygons and labels depicting ethnicity information based on the ‘People’s Atlas of Africa’ by Marc Felix and Charles Meur, Copyright 2001.” Perfect, I thought.

uganda sorghum — Sorghum accessions (Genesys) and ethnic groups in Uganda.

Well, not so fast. It was not altogether easy to download a shapefile of conserved African sorghum landraces from Genesys that would upload into WorldMap, plonk it on top of Ethnicity Felix 2001 and produce a shareable map. Not easy, but possible. It took some time and some divine intervention from Robert, but I do now have a map of African ethnic groups and sorghum collections that other people can have a look at. At left you have a snippet showing Uganda to whet your appetite. So now, in addition to things like ecogeographic gaps in collections, made possible by global climate surfaces, we can also begin to investigate cultural gaps.

September 26, 2011September 26, 2011

Nibbles: Elm disease, Kew genebank, Maize domestication, Wildlife vs livestock, Medieval figs, Alternative food security, Spineless lulo, Mangos for Haiti, Aubergine breeding, Urban ag in Japan, West African research

“Beginning in the late 1990s, Kock travelled throughout Ontario collecting twigs of seemingly healthy mature elms, in what amounted to an elm dating service.”
“…a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness” lands on the Millennium Seed Bank. Hilarity ensues.
What do hopscotch, architecture and maize have in common?
Zebras good for cattle.
The fig deconstructed.
“Improve yields through crop diversity…” ??? Who are these people?
Crops for the Future bemoans the loss of “a spineless variety of Solanum quitoense.” Someone, somewhere must still have it, surely.
Mangos: Haiti’s new best friend?
Home-bred eggplants. Or aubergines.
“Urban agriculture in Japan, cultivating sustainability and well being.” Again? Still?
West Africa to get bunch of specialist biotechnology centres for crop improvement. No word on where the existing national genebanks fit in. Nor, ahem, what role IITA, ICRISAT and the other CGIAR Centres are going to play in all this.

September 25, 2011September 25, 2011

Khan you say agrobiodiversity educational videos?

The Economist’s hymn of praise for the Khan Academy naturally sent me over to explore those of their 2,400 educational videos that had anything to do with agricultural biodiversity. And there, between Logarithmic Scale and Proof by Induction in the New & Noteworthy section, I did indeed find Firestick Farming. But that, good as it was, alas, was all. At least for now.