- “How One Man Nearly Lost his Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden.” Thanks, Danny.
- Bitter food=betrayal.
- DNA bank for Irish dairy and beef cattle being established.
- “… a document from 1631 … mentioned threats to the cacao crop.”
- USAID supports cassava farmers in Africa.
- The simpukng forest gardens of the Dayak deconstructed.
- Shit!
- 1170% of your daily cholesterol per serving. Sounds good to me.
100 things I’ve done: agrobiodiversity edition
You may have come across the “100 things I’ve done” meme. Jeremy succumbed to it, and a lot of fun it was too reading about it. I’ve just come across a somewhat more specialized version, by a geologist. Maybe there’s room for an agrobiodiversity version? If so, here are ten things that I think should be included, off the top of my head. I haven’t done them all, but I hope to, some day.
- Harvest (or buy in the supermarket) and then prepare and eat a dish of traditional leafy greens in Africa.
- Botanize crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent.
- Talk cassava cultivars with the inhabitants of an Amazonian village.
- Take part in the Ethiopian coffee ceremony at the coffee field genebank near Jimma.
- See volunteer sweet potato seedlings being protected in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
- Visit the Vavilov Institute.
- Walk through a milpa at harvest time.
- Look at potato varieties and wild relatives around Lake Titicaca.
- Visit the Ifugao rice terraces.
- Make the pilgrimage up to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Leave your suggestions in the comments.
Who you gonna call?
If you’re in the Pacific region and you’ve got a problem in the following areas, that is:
- Animal health & production
- Biosecurity & trade facilitation
- Crop production
- Genetic resources
- Forests and trees
- Forestry & agriculture diversification
- Information & communication and extension
- Plant health
- Agriculture & forestry policy
SPC, that’s who, by email. Great to see my old colleagues in the Land Resources Division in Fiji setting this up. It builds on the pioneering work of PestNet in the region. Best wishes to them all.
Mautam!
Once every 48 years, forests of the bamboo known as Melocanna baccifera go into exuberant flower in parts of northeast India. And then, like clockwork, the event is invariably followed by a plague of black rats that spring from nowhere to spread destruction and famine in their wake. For the first time on film, NOVA and National Geographic capture this massive rat population explosion in the kind of vivid detail not possible in 1959, when the last invasion occurred.
Sounds like a must-watch. Via.
Nibbles: Berries, Women, Marsh Arabs, Maple, Sorghum, Nuts, Conference, Banana
- Let the berry wars commence. Thanks to Hannes for taking sides.
- Women active in African agriculture. Well I never.
- Iraq’s marshes in trouble again. This time it’s drought.
- Gorosoe in Korea: “…it soothes my stomach after a hangover.”
- Vavilov set right on sorghum in China.
- Protected pine forest threatened by logging in Russia. Nuts!
- 1st International IFOAM Conference on Organic Animal and Plant Breeding.
- International Banana Symposium: Global Perspectives on Asian Challenges.