- Designing the next generation of community-based natural resource management projects. No agriculture. Weird. Well, not so much actually.
- Extension systems have a website! Yeah but do they need one?
- Informal seed system working just fine in Indian Himalayas. So maybe the extension system is not needed? But, hey, they have a website, did I mention that?
- Climate Change and Crop Production: The Book. And: The Conference. No but wait, here’s another.
- The unusual crop that is cassava.Yeah, but in The Economist?
- ” …among the largest collections of endophytes…” Not a lot of people know that.
- Old Irish goats (and others, to be fair) meet to talk about, well, Old Irish goats.
- The great Plant Cuttings.
- How to design an ethnobotanical garden. Would coca find a place?
- Musings on the evolution of weeds.
Saying goodbye to a maverick
The distinguished agricultural journalist Tom Hargrove died a few days ago. A contributor to a closed mailing list noted that he had made “a stellar scientific contribution to the CGIAR” in particular, though his renown went far beyond that. Very true. All the more so as he was one of the first to question the wisdom “of growing genetically uniform varieties over millions of hectares…from within the ‘lions den’ where the dogma was gospel.” Perhaps his greatest legacy is that the dogma is not as entrenched as it was.
Nibbles: Vegetables training, Genebanks and genomics, Kew and CWR, AnGR ABS
- AVRDC’s 30th International Vegetable Training Course Vegetables: From Seed to Table and Beyond.
- Cameron Peace’s excellent presentation on genomics and fruit genebanks at the recent PAG symposium organized by NPGS staff Chris Richards (Ft. Collins) and Clare Coyne (Pullman).
- Kew’s latest Samara newsletter does crop wild relatives.
- Exploring the need for specific measures for access and benefit-sharing of animal genetic resources for food and agriculture. Results of a workshop.
Livestock genetic resources meetings galore
Nibbles: Indigenous Peoples, Bananas, Ants
- Got something to say to the International Funders for Indigenous Peoples? Call for Sessions.
- “[B]anana variety diversity contributes positively to reducing yield losses caused by biophysical constraints.” IFPRI paper, so you know you can believe it.
- Weaver ants drafted to protect African fruit and nut crops. Again.