Through interviews and reenactments, The Natural History of the Chicken investigates the role of the chicken in American life and tells several remarkable stories.
Via.
New LEISA mag online
A new edition of LEISA magazine is online, with it’s usual eclectic selection of articles, this time dedicated to the farmer as entrepreneur. It isn’t the most user-friendly site, but we did a bit of work and singled out a few articles.
- Building a community seed bank.
- Marketing a diversity of fruit products.
- High altitude rice in Rwanda.
- The UN’s “new” approach to agriculture.
Anything else you think we should link to specifically?
BBC’s Farm Swap is online
That BBC radio documentary about farmers trying to learn from each other is out at last.
In Farm Swap, Mike Gallagher meets two farmers who are working outside their own countries.
They are both prepared to experience a new environment but for very different reasons.
You can listen online or download a podcast.
In part one Pedro, an idealistic young Ecuadorian farmer, visits Hawaii…
During his 4 month visit to Hawaii, Pedro visits a coffee plantation and learns how to encourage sustainable agriculture.
But as well as discovering new farming techniques and sharing experiences to take back to Ecuador, what can Pedro teach Hawaiian farmers in return?
As I said before, I think farmer-to-farmer exchanges are potentially a great way to learn. I’ll be tuning in.
Linking up livestock databases
The object of most biodiversity web sites in animal agriculture is the ‘breed’ or population, and not the individual animal within (an exception are some breed societies which present individual animal data on some of their most important breeding animals). With the linkage of CryoWEB and FABISnet, for the first time, production type databases with individual animal records are directly linked to the global breeds database network, thereby creating breeds statistics in FABISnet which are directly derived from production data. Perhaps the procedure can also be a model for other data in the biodiversity databases.
That’s from a piece on animal genetic resources databases by Elldert Groeneveld of the Institute of Farm Animal Genetic in Germany, published as article of the month in the Globaldiv Newsletter. It’s entitled Databases and Biodiversity: From Single Databases to a Global Network and you can find it on page 8. I suppose there is a similar problem in crops, where you might have evaluation data for various different lines selected from a single population. But somehow you don’t hear so much about it. Is it that the links between conservationists and users (that is, those doing the evaluation) are better developed in the livestock field?
Nibbles: Indian livestock, Breadfruit, Grants, CIAT, Coffee
- “Estimates indicate that 50% of the indigenous goat, 30% of sheep, 20% of cattle and almost all poultry breeds are threatened.”
- Fiji studies breadfruit varieties.
- Research grants for young scientists in developing countries. ABD is in. Via .
- CIAT has a blog, and it’s pretty.
- Small coffee farmers honoured in Peru. For conservation!