- “Organic management practices appear to result in elevated levels of grain micronutrient concentration.” By no means the whole story.
- Tom too takes The Economist to task.
- Afghanistan’s opium growers. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
- Nixtamalization for the rest of us. More than you could ever want to know. Rye tortillas!
- Chocolate began with leftover beer? Seems unlikely.
- Take the fight to the monster’s lair. Swap seeds in Brussels. h/t Patrick.
- Dogs or dholes? Yeah I didn’t know what they were either.
- There was a workshop on “Seed System and Climate Change” in Bhutan a month ago.
- Big biofuel project in Tanzania bites the dust. And the land they “leased,” what happened to that?
- Ancient grinding holes. Might mesquite be another edible never domesticated?
Nibbles: Cloves in Zanzibar, Invasive species, Fingerprinting genebanks, Seed ownership, Pollinator photography, Columbids
- Clovefield.
- They Eat Invasives, Don’t They?
- The Wrong Seeds.
- Seeds of One’s Own.
- Bee Photographs.
- Clay Pigeons.
Nibbles: Flora, Agronomy podcasts, Stats, GFAR, Horses, Lettuce, Churst forests, Brazil nut, Grassland diversity, Baobab, Flotation, Botanic gardens and invasives, Nutrigenomics
- Picture guide to West African plants. Includes agrobiodiversity!
- Iowa State Agronomy podcasts. Some cool stuff. Check out the one on “Modeling Seed Germination Over Time to Decide When to Regenerate Seed Lots in Long-term Storage.”
- A “formal global program to develop subnational agricultural land-use statistics“? Riiiiight.
- GFAR meeting on sustainable use of agrobiodiversity says “[w]e need to initiate solid and inclusive actions to build concerted and practical actions on sustainable use.” Well they do say actions speak louder than words.
- Researcher “trying to remove the perception that hackneys are ‘half-crazed.'” I’d rather pay to save them if they were crazy, but that’s me.
- Romaine: germplasm to breeding lines. But to cultivars? Private sector to pick up the slack.
- Crops not mentioned among species that save our lives.
- Saving sacred groves in Ethiopia. By building pit latrines. Well why not?
- Brazil nut spread by people.
- A trade-off between species and genetic diversity? Say it
ain’t so! - Today’s iconic species threatened by climate change is the baobab.
- An Egyptian archaeobotanical blog.
- Botanic gardens can threaten biodiversity.
- Nature has (or had, it’s a couple months old) a supplement on nutrigenomics.
Animal Genetic Resources reminder
The newsletter of the IUCN Species Survival Commission and the IUCN Species Programme has just alerted me to a (fairly) recent edition of FAO’s international journal Animal Genetic Resources which I think we missed. It contains, among many other interesting things, a paper on “Conservation status of wild relatives of animals used for food” by P.J.K. McGowan.
Nibbles: Plant Cuttings, Truffles, Diseases, Vegetables, Capsicum, Calestous Juma
- Nigel Chaffey’s roundup of botanical news is out.
- Learn how to grow truffles. For Canadians.
- ILRI policy brief on how agriculture and human health are connected. Bottom line: it’s complicated.
- AVRDC introduces you to Mali’s Magnificent Cube.
- Biofortified on pepper breeding.
- Calestous Juma in the New Agriculturist on why he’s optimistic about African agriculture.