- RBG Kew launches new website. Busy, busy, busy.
- Turkeys domesticated twice, neither time in Turkey. Gobble, gobble.
- Warmer-than-expected weather hits Thai sugar production. Sweet.
- Climate shocks hit poor countries’ exports. Shocked. h/t Cecilia.
- Biodiversity law could stymie research,” and that’s all I know, because the rest is behind a paywall. Access and benefit share THIS!
Nibbles: Amman, Banana disease, Survey, Qatar, Wetlands
- MSM on Amman meeting; eat Luigi’s dust.
- Black sigatoka disease confirmed on St Lucia; eats banana plantations.
- “Eggs come from sheep” kids survey surprise shock; eat anything.
- Qatar builds a genebank.
- On World Wetlands Day, Lake Chad protected and British farmland flooded. Will some crop wild relatives benefit?
It’s easy to follow Vavilov
Have we mentioned that the great NI Vavilov has started to tweet?
Some questions from day 2 in Amman
Got to go out to dinner, so not much time to blog, but I thought I’d tease you with some of the more interesting questions that were posed by speakers during this second day of the Amman conference on food security in the drylands under climate change. I’ll post (some of) the answers later.
Calvin Qualset: What’s so new about climate change for breeders?
Jose Cubero: Why are there no commercial faba bean hybrids?
Raj Paroda: Is aerobic rice the answer to decreasing methane emissions?
Theib Oweis: Shouldn’t we measure productivity on the basis of unit of water consumed rather than of land used?
Ken Street: Can’t we think of a better way of identifying germplasm for evaluation than core collections?
Salvatore Ceccarelli: Why, in this year of biodiversity, are we still wedded to the idea of varietal uniformity?
Nibbles: Amman again, DNA hype, Blight-resistant spuds, Seeds, Sorghum, Brassicas, UK Food Security
- Crop Genebank’s Knowledge Base enjoys an outing in Amman.
- Great Headlines of our Time: Researchers fight world hunger by mapping the soybean genome.
- Blight-resistant potatoes from Hungary to the UK.
- Danish Seed Savers 2010 list available.
- “We want to make sorghum to be even better than maize,” says Kenyan gene jockey. Why?
- “The dog is the brassica of the vertebrate world.” Jeremy says: “Never met one I didn’t like … cooked right.”
- James sprouts off on brassicas too.
- New UK approach to food security: apples.