- Oh bliss. Ethiopian honey travels to Norway, sweet deal for both ends. Locavores perplexed?
- The Economist hot for bio-char.
- “Our family has farmed this land forever. We’re part of the corn, and its part of us.”
Nibbles: Conference, Organics, horses, bio-char
- The UNU-WIDER Project on “African Development: Myths and Realities” looks at the reasons put forward for Africa’s disappointing development record, attempting to differentiate between myth and reality. Via CAPRi News.
- Stirring up the organic is better hornet’s nest
- “Brits use wild horses to promote biodiversity.” A rare breed, too.
- back40 is bothered by the lack of real progress on biochar.
The Hungarian Agricultural Museum
So there’s a Hungarian Agricultural Museum in Budapest.
On display are implements of rural handicraft and machines for lightening the load of the farmer, documents about the raising of animals (especially horses, cattle, sheep and pigs), as well as forestry, hunting (there is a fine collection of trophies) and fishing.
Actually it’s supposed to be the “biggest museum of agriculture in Europe.” I personally find that “fine collection of trophies” in the Hall of Hunting ever-so-slightly creepy, but the rest of the museum looks like it might be quite interesting, at least in parts. A little difficult to tell as most of the website is only in Hungarian. Anyone out there been to see it? Via.
Herbaria get it together
Looks like the Paris herbarium (P, to taxonomy geeks), one of the largest in the world at 8,000,000 specimens, is finally sorting itself out. That’s really good news, because Paris is also perhaps the most frustrating herbarium in the world, due to the backlog in processing specimens and the generally sub-par conditions. All that’s going to change.
Once work moving and reclassifying the herbarium is complete, it will also be the world’s largest collection of plant specimens available on the internet. “We shall have 8m images, with a photograph of each plate on the museum’s website,” says the senior curator Jean-Michel Guiraud.
But I was particularly intrigued by this little throwaway final paragraph in the Guardian piece on the catch-up project. 1
International collaboration is under way to avoid duplication between the world’s top herbaria: primarily Kew Gardens and the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the two largest alongside Paris, but also smaller collections belonging to natural history museums or botanical gardens in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Washington and New York.
I need to find out more about what this really means. You certainly don’t want to avoid duplication of specimens entirely, for safety reasons. Maybe it’s more a question of exchanging information on holdings so that at least herbaria know the extent of duplication. Anyway, I want to know how they’ll do it. Because it will be a cold day in genebank database hell before “international collaboration” will be able to “avoid duplication” in the world’s top genebanks.
Nibbles: Forest smells, Paris herbarium, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Vertical farms, Biofuels
- Taking in the Atmosphere of the Forest is good for you.
- The Paris herbarium sorts itself out. ‘Bout time too.
- Some scientists are … keeping seeds on ice for future generations, but one Arizona seed farm is cultivating them in the desert sun.
- At last. Ford Denison blasts the vertical farm nuts. So we don’t have to.
- Fill ‘er up — with watermelon juice?