Information

June 27, 2011June 27, 2011

Nibbles: Beautiful models, Beautiful bank, Organic FAO, Eskimo diet, Indian medicinals, Maya nut studentship, Fishy infographics

Official confirmation of the need for better crop growth models.
More on CIP’s high-tech spud bank. In other news, CIP also has banks of other Andean roots/tubers, but don’t get me started on that one.
“FAO has relegated organic agriculture to a footnote in the discussion of food security in the long run.” Fighting talk. Wonder if that will change with the new DG.
Cook like an Inuit.
Cultivating medicinal plants in India. Let’s see how that goes.
Wanna study the Maya nut?
More great Guardian infographics, aquatic edition.
“This one tastes like cotton candy.” Breeding strawberries the hard way.

June 27, 2011June 27, 2011

Roads not taken

The BBC has a history of botany, but it’s not available in my area, despite the fact, pointed out by my friend Michael, that the Beeb’s motto is “Nation shall speak peace onto nation.” And the Save Our Species coalition puts out a call for proposals for Threatened Species Grants and Rapid Action Grants. But plants, let alone crop wild relatives, are not eligible (at least for now). Don’t you wish sometimes that you’d just stayed in bed?

June 24, 2011June 22, 2011

British Library has online stuff on agrobiodiversity shock

This page is from the tractate Kilayim (which translates as ‘of two kinds’) which deals with the laws regarding forbidden mixtures of species in agriculture, breeding and clothing. It forms part of Zera’im (Seeds), one of the six divisions or orders of the Mishnah. Added to the text is Moses Maimonides’s commentary translated from the original Arabic. The diagrams show ways of dividing up plots of land to grow permitted types of seeds and mixed species. This book itself was printed in Naples in 1492 by Joshua Solomon Soncino, and was the first to contain the complete text of the Mishnah.

One of the many treasures awaiting you at the British Library, this one in the gallery section. And there’s more to come.

June 23, 2011June 23, 2011

Nibbles: Cranberry pests, Productivity, Resistance breeding, Jackfruit, Oca etc, Millets, Root crops, Semen cryo

Guess what. Cranberry pests prefer certain varieties.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Estimating yield of food crops grown by smallholder farmers from IFPRI.
CIAT first CG centre to publish peer-reviewed video, on resistance selection. In other news, there are peer-reviewed videos?
CFTF draws our attention to Jackfruit – Forgotten Kalpavriksha, “a common trope”.
$3.4 million worth of good news for food security and diversity in the Andes. “Small Andean tuber crops” involved.
Minor millets star in new film shared by Bioversity.
Want the Philippines to be self-sufficient in rice? Eat rootcrops. IRRI unavailable for comment.
Way more than any sensible person will ever want to know about duck and goose semen.

June 23, 2011June 21, 2011

Picking a good agrobiodiversity beach

My apologies to Robert Hijmans, the developer of DIVA-GIS. I had forgotten how awsomely awesome his software. It was really only the work of half an hour to export a shapefile of the distribution of wild and weedy accessions from Genesys, open it in DIVA-GIS, produce a gridfile of taxon richness, export it as a KMZ, and open it in Google Earth, together with The Guardian’s European bathing places dataset, which I had prepared earlier.

A beach called La Figueirette at Theoule-sur-Mer is right in the middle of that (relative) hotspot of species richness not far from the Italian border shown in light orange on the map above. And the beach doesn’t look too bad either, at least on StreetView.

Now, to check out the lakes…