Information

November 1, 2010November 1, 2010

Live blog today on food security, nutrition and agriculture

hosting a live blog Monday from an AED forum on food security, nutrition and agriculture. John Donnelly, former reporter at the Boston Globe, will be writing the posts. Watch here for updates.

Wait, that’s TODAY!

LATER: Also today, ask a UNEP expert what the Nagoya deal means.

October 30, 2010

Nibbles: African data, Wild beans, Wild chickens, Heirloom tomatoes, Wild wheat

African data centre planned.
“…genetic variability and phenotypic plasticity of plant anti-herbivore defences allow plant populations to rapidly respond to changing environmental conditions.” In a crop wild relative, no less.
The genetics of chicken domestication. I’d like to see the results of those crosses.
Do you have these heirloom tomatoes?
Getting increased heat tolerance from a wild relative into wheat.

October 28, 2010October 28, 2010

Toma cheese, phone home

“It’s not difficult,” Dr Lombardi said. “What is more difficult is to deliver the product the consumer wants, something not perfect, but with no big flaws either.”

What’s not difficult? To stick an RFID chip and a printed code on the wrapper of a cheese. The code can be read by a smartphone and links the cheese lover “to a phone-optimised website that allows them to browse the information registered about the cheese”.

Matt reports from Terra Madre on a scheme that hopes to add value to Europe’s vast diversity of cheeses and the breeds and ecosystems that produce in a way that even I can understand (and use).

October 28, 2010October 28, 2010

Nibbles: Ethics, Seeds, Coconut, Nordic genebank

Ethical Considerations in Agro-biodiversity Research, Collecting, and Use. In case you were thinking of doing some.
Seed control ceded?
“Scores of women from the rural households brought in finest homemade recipes on coconut.” My kind of conference.
“Unique plant bank threatened,” says Google Translate of Nordic genebanks. Thanks Britta.

October 28, 2010October 28, 2010

Old and new Nordic spring wheats side by side

Pictures being worth a thousand words, and all that, here are pictures — moving pictures, no less — of some Swedish wheats that were planted out for regeneration and characterization earlier in 2010.

Thanks Dag for the link. How hard would it be to make links to this sort of thing available from all-knowing databases, I wonder? Dag thanks the film-maker, Axel Diederichsen, for putting the names of the varieties into his description of the film, and suggests adding the accession numbers. If everyone did that, some kind of spider could surely crawl the web looking for, and linking to, any and all mentions of the number, and linking to them. With human curation, of course.

Is that crazy?