Livestock

Nibbles: DIY plantains, Poppies, Fruit portions, EU seed law workshop, Sustainable intensification, Nutrition & ag, Traditional medicine, Soil maps, US biodiversity maps, Genomics & genebanks, Indian seed film, Food preservation

Someone needs to tell the Los Angeles Times that plantains are not the “tropical cousin of the banana”.
Someone else needs to tell “British and American agricultural advisers” that poppies are generally going to be a better bet than cotton in Helmland Province. Like they were in Ghazipur.
Is there anyone who can tell schools not to serve whole fruit, when children prefer bite-sized pieces?
And who will tell us what happens at the Workshop in the EU Seed Law, in Vienna today and tomorrow?
In which we are once again told that sustainable intensification is the answer, but not how to do it.
A tool for helping agricultural development types figure out what to do about nutrition.
Let the Times of India tell you about how wild fruits and seeds are used in traditional medicine.
ISRIC tells the world about its new soil maps of Africa.
And the US government about its biodiversity, also in maps.
Lots of people recently told their stories of how genomics is going to revolutionize genetic resources use to a meeting in ICRISAT, and now ICRISAT tells us.
A new film tells the story of rice savers in India. Not, presumably, though, Bihar.
Are you really telling me Genghis Khan was a food waste champion?

Eat steak!
No, eat cicadas!
Farm pearls!
Get a grant!
CIAT got one, to map crop wild relatives!
Not sure if any of these drought tolerance genes in cassava are from wild relatives, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I would likewise not be surprised if both cicadas and cassava featured in Malawian permaculture.
Punjab’s 1st investigative e-paper doesn’t allow visitors to highlight and copy text, which means that the potentially interesting book about agricultural sustainability it mentions will go ungoogled.
Which is a pity because I was really hoping for a nice segue into this conference on, ahem, agricultural sustainability, to take place in a few months in China.
Which I could then have followed with a plug for the FAO Commission on GRFA, which many of us will be attending next week here in Rome.
No, wait: Agricultural Sustainability: Progress and Prospects in Crop Research.
But of course the best argument for sustainability is the moral one, right?
That. Or beer.

Rwandan women receive gift of goats. Now all they need is to get over the taboo on drinking goat milk.
Immortal tomatoes. Oh no! They’re clones! Eeeeeek!
Breeding heat-tolerant wheats. Wonder whether they’ll be doing it with doubled haploids.

Botanic gardens get into the restoration business. So that people can again eat nutritious forest foods. No, really, even the BBC says so.
Militant Filipino NGOs target IRRI. Not for the first time. And probably not the last.
Anyone planning to go to the Beltain at Butser Ancient Farm? Only a month to go…
You are probably already using at least one of these.
Paris looking to go all sheepish.
I don’t know about you, but I immediately turn off when somebody says that X is the only answer to Y. Even when the X is agro-ecology.
Même s’ils le disent en français.
Chinese “board beans” are actually lablab shock.
You going to spend an evening at The Genome Analysis Centre discussing the value of genebanks? Tell us about it!
Dutch seed savers looking to get organized.
New York times goes overboard for Digital Green participatory video.

A heart-warming tale of raising pigs the right way.
Another heart-warming tale of breeding better wheat in Colorado.
Urban agriculture goes intensive and corporate. Not very heart warming.
Cornell students to solve nutrition problems in Ghana after 10-day visit. Is that heart warming? I have my doubts.
Alfred Russel Wallace’s very own sago cakes preserved at Kew. If that isn’t heart warming, I don’t know what is.