- Anissa makes a meal of red rice from Western China eco-museum.
- Want to influence the US Feed the Future “global hunger and food security initiative”? Course you do.
- Peak heat and maize yields in the US. Bear it in mind when you read today’s flurry of interest in a new study from David Lobell et al.
- Seed mixtures not a good idea? Say it isn’t so!
- $4 million to continue development of biofortified sorghum.
- Cooking up a storm, millets edition.
- They’ve outlasted the dinosaurs, but they still need help.
- USDA gets blue in the face about blueberries.
Nibbles: Coffee, British orchards, Wild foraging, African agriculture, Sesame, Taro wine, African beer, Brazilian pastures, Hemp
- First of all, I need a cup of coffee.
- Stop Press: Britain’s orchards neglected. Prince Charles to be called in to help?
- Eating the wild, in San Francisco and San Diego.
- IFAD on what African farmers need: infrastructure, insurance, investment. Apparently.
- Harvesting sesame in Greece: The video.
- Filipinos make wine from Hawaiian traditional food. Strange the Hawaiians hadn’t thought of that. But perhaps they did.
- And while we’re on the subject of booze…
- Destroying the Pantanal and Cerrado in a sustainable manner.
- Hey, it’s Hemp History Week! And you know how to celebrate that, don’t you.
Nibbles: Fair mangoes, Rice domestication, Saline collections, Spice collections, Aquaculture, Salmon
- Fair trade Haitian mangoes hit the shelves.
- Molecular boffins use nifty new toys to re-write rice history. Until the next time.
- The genebank of the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai has found material suitable for, ahem, saline agriculture.
- The genebank of the Indian Institute of Spices Research in Calicut has a large collection of, ahem, spices.
- The downside of tilapia.
- And, speaking of fish, it’s not all bad news.
Brainfood: Diet, Olives, Beef, Shade trees, Tree regeneration, Poverty, Weeds, Birds
- Farming for balanced nutrition: an agricultural approach to addressing micronutrient deficiency among the vulnerable poor in Africa. Dietary diversity is a good idea for many reasons.
- Cultivar characterization of Aegean olive oils with respect to their volatile compounds. Only two varieties, and they do differ.
- Beef Authentication and Retrospective Dietary Verification Using Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis of Bovine Muscle and Tail Hair. Back40 has an explanation of why this is more important than all the certification schemes in the world.
- Promoting native trees in shade coffee plantations of southern India: comparison of growth rates with the exotic Grevillea robusta. Some native species might be able to compete, more research needed.
- Regeneration of Vitellaria paradoxa and Parkia biglobosa in a parkland in Southern Burkina Faso. Vitellaria doing better, possibly because farmers are overharvesting Parkia seeds.
- Defining the poor by the rural communities of Burkina Faso: implications for the development of sustainable parkland management. It’s complicated.
- Does soil biota benefit from organic farming in complex vs. simple landscapes? Organic farming increases weed diversity. No word on what it does for birds, but…
- Species richness and composition of bird communities in various field margins of Poland. Some types of field margins are better than others. No word on what they do for weeds.
Nibbles: GBIF, Grains, Sorghum, Carnival, ECP/GR, Rabbits, Conference, Satoyama
- The evolution of the GBIF registry. If you need to ask, you don’t need to know. And if you don’t, you do.
- US farmers encouraged to try millets, sorghum — for birds. …
- … while in Kenya, Farmers turn to sorghum to boost their food security. They’re eating their beer.
- The latest Berry go Round blog carnival is up at Foothills Fancies. I liked the Red Filbert.
- The European Cooperative Programme for Plant Genetic Resources, known to its friends as ecp/gr, has a spiffy new website. But no RSS feed, so it’s unlikely we’ll be bringing you anything else of interest from that site.
- Battery rabbits back on the menu in England? A warren of contradictions, I tell you.
- International Conference on In Situ/On farm conservation and use of agrobiodiversity (fruit crops and wild fruit species) in Central Asia, 23-26 August, in Tashkent. Programme PDF here.
- “Japan should look to satoyama and satoumi for inspiration.” I thought it already had …