- Boffins trying to domesticate Allanblackia for its oil.
- Phyteuma spicatum must be saved, British folklore depends on it. How about domesticating it?
- Farmers replanting forest in inland Niger delta. Sort of domesticating the forest, you mean?
- And here’s another domesticated forest, this time in Kerala.
- Are oysters domesticated? And seaweeds? Lots of uses for seaweeds, after all.
- Why plant breeding is incompatible with organic agriculture. Eh? First of a trilogy.
- Management of plant genetic resources in Brazil deconstructed.
- Oh dear, now boffins say avoiding bycatch may not be good after all.
- CTA calls for research notes in preparation for proposal writing workshop on neglected and underutilized plants.
- New Sight and Life magazine is out, with interesting discussions of Vitamin A supplementation in newborns and HIV patients.
- While at Scidev.net HarvestPlus defends biofortified crops against charge of medicalizing micronutrient deficiency.
Nibbles: Sorghum, Microbes, Seeds, Biofortification, Spent grain, Fermentation, Fisheries, Millennium Villages, Cooking fish
- All the cool crops are doing it. Sorghum has a Facebook page. Any others?
- Soil microbes showing “increasing antibiotic resistance“.
- Big, expensive, new Seed Tech Institute for East Africa. I’m suspending judgement. h/t CAS-IP
- New Agriculturalist does the AgroSalud thing: biofortified staples.
- Speaking of which, you can biofortify chapatis with distillers grains. But what will the livestock eat?
- More fermentation goodness.
- Cobia is the new cod.
- Nutrition in the Millennium Villages.
- NW USA seafood recipes have moved up the foodchain in last 100 years, because rarer and more expensive.
Science for the People 28
The weekly carnival of all that’s good about science in the blogosphere is up again, and there are things of peripheral interest to us.
- The world, it seems, is full of Pepper Mild Mottle Virus, and so are many people. But can a plant virus make people sick? Vincent Racaniello says “maybe”. Pass the Tabasco.
- And Christie Wilcox detoxifies some of the myths around choosing to eat better. I’m not sure they apply to the people whose malnutrition we’re most concerned about, but still a useful round-up of the stories we tell ourselves about food. Pass the carrot sticks.
As ever, even though I’ve singled out the Science for the People posts that are of direct interest, there’s lots more on offer there, so go, and indulge yourself.
Farming systems atlas taking shape
Our friends at CIAT are putting together a lot of geo-referenced data on farming systems around the world. Check out in particular what they call the Generation Atlas. Below is a screen shot of a detail of the map of the distribution of aluminium toxicity in Africa.
Somebody somewhere is probably working on mashing this up with the germplasm data from SINGER or even the crop wild relatives data from GBIF, a la FIGS.
Nibbles: Recognizing breeds, Cannabis in New Zealand, Farming systems data, Maize inbreds, Zinc in wheat, Markets for nature, Ramie, Milk and drought, ELBARN
- Computer program recognizes cattle breeds.
- NZ dope getting stronger? Maybe, and I hope so, but probably impossible to tell from this study.
- Need farming systems data?
- Psst, wanna know how to determine the essentially derived status of maize inbred lines?
- High zinc wheat works.
- Michael Jenkins of Forests Trends on using markets to save biodiversity.
- The phylogeny of ramie and its wild relatives sorted out. Sort of.
- Pearl millet landraces are the best under drought.
- Area action plans for local breeds in Europe are out.