- How to breed a better brassica.
- Kenya encourages farmers to switch from tobacco to food.
- The King is dead … Long live the King.
- A very long post about Challenges to Genetic Diversity and Implications For Food Security in South Asia.
- Plumpy’nut set free, more or less.
- Dirt, the movie — I’d like to see that.
- Real popcorn, Yaqui style.
- Quínoa andina podría cultivarse en desiertos del mundo. Don’t they have their own orphan crops?
- Red List assessment of nine Aegilops species in Armenia. New wheat wild relatives paper.
Nibbles: Australia, China, Turkey, Slovenia, Soybeans, Grapes, Consultation
- Australian breeders discover the joys of participatory breeding — for Oz farmers too.
- Chinese biodiversity symposium a huge success.
- Weird, and weirdly broken, GEF Small Grants Programme reports on a Turkish landrace project. Why here? Why now?
- “Biodiversity: why should we care?” Slovenia’s answers.
- Soybean ability to use iron affects its ability to use nitrogen. Full paper here.
- Missouri grapes to save the world. Show me!
- First ever Regional Consultation for the Strengthening, Conservation and Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in the Pacific Island Countries kicked off yesterday. Where are our people on the spot?
The revival of taro biodiversity in Hawaii, in film
This just in from a reader in Hawaii. Thanks, Penny.
The film short “Na Ono o Ka Aina; Delicacies of the Land” featuring Jerry Konanui, a Hawaiian, expert in the identification of traditional Hawaiian taro cultivars, and an inspiration in their recovery. This film is the work of award winning Hawaii-based filmmakers, Na Maka o Ka Aina. The film garnered awards at the Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Hawaii film festivals in 2009 and 2010, and the short was featured on National Geographic’s “All Roads Film Festival” in 2008. One way to protect local crop biodiversity — reinspire everyone — from farmers to researchers to students; especially within the community that once created that diversity. It’s in the numbers; the more old cultivars we recover and grow and the more who grow, the less risk of loss we will have. You can get a taste of the film short — and the ono (delicious) taros of Hawaii below.
Nibbles: Plant Ethics, Genebanks, Africa
- Call for papers on Plant Ethics. Not just PICs and ABS.
- Today’s genebanks … Prairie Fruit in Saskatchewan, Canada, and
- something or other in Montenegro.
- Farmer savants explains why I couldn’t be bothered to link to the original loopy prognostifications.
3D trees in Google Earth
The latest version of Google Earth has 3D trees! Just a few cities’ parks, a couple of wild sites (rainforest, mangroves…) and a reforestation project for now, but surely more to come.
I look forward to seeing the world’s great field genebanks in 3D in due course, such as the coconut genebank in Ivory Coast or the Breadfruit Institute’s collection in Hawaii. And maybe eventually even smaller ones, such as this fruit collection I visited last week in Tajikistan.
But maybe we could start with Pavlovsk?