Category: Information

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Nibbles: Mesopotamian ag & gardens, Old dogs, Ethiopian church groves, High Desert Seed, Australian Rubus, Fuggle hop, New sweet potato, Naming organisms

  1. Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
  2. Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
  3. I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
  4. Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
  5. Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
  6. Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
  7. The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
  8. Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
  9. They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.
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I say millets, you say mijo, mijo

Dr Don Osborn is a “specialist in rural development with expertise in natural resource management, agriculture, African languages, and localization of information technology.” Very active on Twitter, he had an interesting thread over there a few days ago on the International Year of Millets.

It seems the singular version of the word “millets” is used in the official documentation in some of the official UN languages. It may well be that “mijo” in Spanish, for example, is a generic term covering all the various species involved that doesn’t easily take a plural, but I do hope this doesn’t detract from the focus on diversity.

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Nibbles: Green FAO, Veggie breeding, TABLE debate, Better seeds

  1. There’s an FAO Global Conference on Green Development of Seed Industries this Thursday and Friday. Includes sessions on genebanks.
  2. I hope it will cover the breeding of weird — and not-so-weird — vegetables as well as this Food Programme episode did.
  3. And debate the issues as effectively as was done by Pat Mooney and Charles Godfray at this TABLE event.
  4. Meanwhile, in Malawi and the Philippines…
  5. All we are saying…
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Questioning maps

As regular readers know all too well, I can’t resist a map mashup. So when I saw the latest data on deforestation in the Amazon, I fired up MapWarper and GoogleEarth and got to work.

And here’s a look at how recent deforestation in Brazil relates to the localities of past cassava collecting, at least as far as Genesys knows about it.

Now, I don’t know in what way deforestation (and associated disruptions) relates to loss of cassava diversity, but there’s a chance that it might. Could make an interesting PhD project for someone.

Anyway, encouraged by my pretty result, and remembering that I wanted to do something with some shiny new maps I had heard about, I next mashed up sorghum accessions and poverty in Burkina Faso. Here’s what I got.

What’s going on? Why are there relatively fewer sorghum accessions where poverty is higher (more red)? Are those places just harder to reach? Or do people there really grow less sorghum.

Again, I don’t know. But I think it would be interesting to find out.

All speculation welcome in the comments.

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Brainfood: RICA, AEGIS, CWR, Agrosavia, DSI, CRISPR, Tradition, SNS, Stability, Birds, Sparing, Genetic erosion