- Online map of horticultural projects. Mash it up with the CGIAR map, anyone?
- Evolution and taxonomy of crop groups: Annonaceae and Allium.
- Dealing with wheat stripe in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Some good news there.
- Nigel Chaffey does his usual thing. Inimitable.
- Today’s thing on what Africa needs for this Greener or Double Green or whatever Revolution everyone wants it to have.
- Latest from FAO on what’s happening in livestock genetic resources conservation around the world.
- And the latest wonder food. I’ll pass, thanks.
- Improving capers through radiation. One of those things where you have to wonder whether it’s really all worth it.
- The genetic diversity of the Polish common hamster. Wait, what?
- Biofortified crops to the rescue. Again. Gotta wonder about overexposure. The backlash, when it inevitably comes, is going to be a doozy.
Nibbles: Milk deaths, Peas, Botany, Mixed cropping
- The perils of industrial agriculture‘s race to the bottom.
- Heirloom veg nuts play with gene jockeys and everybody wins.
- The roadside botanist, bananas and cassava biodiversity.
- Biodiversity can support a greener revolution in Africa; fine paper. Ignore the press release; it’s rubbish.
Breeding for resilience
Breeding for resilience: a strategy for organic and low-input farming systems? — a conference organized by EUCARPIA that we mentioned a while back — kicks off next week, and the programme looks pretty interesting. I don’t see any obvious ways in which the organizers plan to share the contents more widely, at least until the obligatory proceedings are published, and I hear that there’s no space left.
I wonder what it would cost to hire a couple of top-notch bloggers to cover conferences like these. 1
Nibbles: Gourd, Climate, Khasi, Diet, Mauka, Diseases
- Unusual uses for a gourd.
- CIAT says North Africa will suffer most from climate change. So it must be true.
- Food Festival in the Khasi-Jaintia Hills of Mawphlang in India.
- Forget the global poor and their hidden hunger. We’re not eating our fruit and veg either.
- Evangelinemay1 wants to know how to “bring back biodiversity to our agricultural crops“. Let’s all love-bomb her, shall we?
- Radix has mauka seeds! (He means anthocarps of Mirabilis expansa.)
- ILRI continues to decrease agrobiodiversity — of animal diseases.
A gap in my understanding?
The astonishing enthusiasm for discussions of all things gap-filling shouldn’t be surprising. We need to know what grows where, where it is most diverse, and where we haven’t explored in sufficient depth. Seems to me that most of the underlying datasets depend on outsiders coming in (or sitting in front of their models) and figuring it out. Would it, I wonder, be possible to turn that model on its head?
What if farmers texted the name of the crops (and varieties?) they grow to some spiffy app that collected the coordinates of the sending phone and the data, maybe even using some assumptions about language based on coordinates to translate the crop name?
Telcos could underwrite the effort by donating the cost of the SMS to the apps number. Farmers could be encouraged by offering additional credits on their phone, subject to some scrutiny. And gap-fillers would rejoice.
The big downside, as I see it, is that there is no immediate benefit to the farmers supplying the data. Eventually they enjoy some of the benefits that filling the gaps will undoubtedly bring. But in the meantime, who’ll pay?