The BBC World Service is broadcasting a series of four programmes on the rice cultures of Asia, called Rice Bowl Tales. Starts 28 February, but if you miss it, it seems like the series has already aired on Radio National, and if you follow the link I’ve just given, you should be able to listen online or download audio files.
Training on plant genetic resources
Wageningen University in the Netherlands is holding a six-week training programme in the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources. Full details are available on the Wageningen web site, and the closing date is 21 April.
Impact study with impact
Eldis Agriculture points to a report of a study: Does enhancing information flow to farmers increase rural incomes? Bottom line, it does. At least in the specific Nigerian case studied. Farmers who had taken part in an information project knew more about improved farm practices, had higher incomes, and suffered fewer sick days, although the last difference was not statistically significant. Track down the full report from Eldis.
Podcasts on Agricultural Biodiversity
One of the problems of casting your bread upon the waters with a blog like this is that we actually have no idea what you — the readers — already know about, what you want, and all that. So while some of you may respond to this item with a knowing, “Cool, podcasts, that’ll be fun” others may be thinking “Podcasts? What is he talking about”.
Rather than explain, I’ll just point you to this college’s explanation (which is both clear and useful) and say that podcasts are like internet radio for all. You download a podcast and can listen to it in one of several ways. You can also easily make your own podcasts for others to listen to, something I hope to try here before too long.
Now, to the meat of this post. Agroinnovations has a series of podcasts on agricultural biodiversity that may be interesting. I have not yet listened to any of them myself (too busy blogging about them) but the topics sound worthwhile: entomology, plant pathology, indigenous varieties, Andean crops and more.
So, if you are one of the Cool, podcasts types, and you get to them before I do, why not post a review here and let us all know what they are like?
Technorati Tags: Agricultural biodiversity, Podcast
Crop wild relatives underused
Are crop wild relatives (CWR) more trouble than they’re worth? There are certainly significant challenges involved in including them in breeding programmes, but you’d have thought that between the new molecular tools that are now out there, the greater numbers of CWR accessions in genebanks, and all the information about how useful CWRs can be, breeders would be falling over themselves to make those kinky inter-specific crosses. Well, according to a major review by our friends at Bioversity International (the outfit formerly known as the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute), the use of CWRs in breeding programmes has been steadily increasing in the past 20 years, but probably not as much as might have been expected. There’s been a number of papers recently on CWRs. This paper, also from Bioversity, looks at in situ conservation of CWR. Check out this for a discussion on the definition of the term, and, from some of the same people, there’s this overview of conservation and use of CWR, using a specific example. Here’s an example of conservation assessment and priority-setting for the wild relatives of the peanut. For a discussion of the possible effects of climate change on these species, see this.