- Dave’s Garden does the apple forests of Almaty.
- Agave nectar sweetens the prospects of Otomi women in Mexico.
- Rhizowen investigates silverweed while taxonomists slug it out: Potentilla anserina or Argentina anserina?
- Just what the urban poultryperson needs: a hotel for chickens.
- National Gene Bank of Egypt website untouched.
- A diplomat visit’s Cameroon’s Cornice Agro Pastorale, and is impressed.
- Tackling climate change benefits health … and vice versa.
- Almost certainly more than you needed to know about Palm Oil palm.
Nibbles: CBNRM, Extension, Seed systems, Climate change book and conferences, Cassava, Endophytes, Old Irish Goats, Plant Cuttings, Ethnobotany, Weeds
- Designing the next generation of community-based natural resource management projects. No agriculture. Weird. Well, not so much actually.
- Extension systems have a website! Yeah but do they need one?
- Informal seed system working just fine in Indian Himalayas. So maybe the extension system is not needed? But, hey, they have a website, did I mention that?
- Climate Change and Crop Production: The Book. And: The Conference. No but wait, here’s another.
- The unusual crop that is cassava.Yeah, but in The Economist?
- ” …among the largest collections of endophytes…” Not a lot of people know that.
- Old Irish goats (and others, to be fair) meet to talk about, well, Old Irish goats.
- The great Plant Cuttings.
- How to design an ethnobotanical garden. Would coca find a place?
- Musings on the evolution of weeds.
Livestock genetic resources meetings galore
Selection of pulses for better nutrition
Hot on the heels of the UK’s call for “advances in nutrition and related sciences” to be put to work to improve the efficiency of animal production, comes a paper surveying the protein content and composition of “107 cultivars of important grain legume species”. The primary motivation seems to have been to improve feed quality for pigs, especially for the organic sector which is not supposed to feed supplementary amino acids to make up the shortfall. From the abstract, it seems that feed quality could indeed be enhanced by selecting specific varieties. And a more diverse diet, to supply the amino acids in which most pulses are low?
Nibbles: Dog, Beer, Human Planet, Entomophagy, Food Atlas, Pepper, Barley
- When dog was on the menu.
- Going far, and far back, for beer. And indeed yeast. Always worth the effort.
- BBC launches Human Planet, focusing on “man’s remarkable relationship with the natural world.” Which apparently doesn’t include agriculture.
- Mexicans eat many moth species, and not just the larvae.
- Amazing interactive food atlas for the US. wish I had a use for it, but someone surely does.
- Breeding a “better” Jalapeño pepper — to hold more cheese, natcho.
- Food as politics; the tsampa-eaters of the TAR. h/t GOOD.