- Nancy Turner, great food anthropologist, deconstructs dinner on air.
- Breeding for resilience: a strategy for organic and low-input farming systems? Eucarpia conference in Paris in December. Love the ?
- Ford Denison on evolution in reverse: crops that become weeds.
- Nature on evolution in forward: crop breeders look at roots.
- “Shade-coffee farms support native bees that maintain genetic diversity in tropical forests.” Good to know.
- Want to know about Access & Benefit Sharing negotiations? We thought so.
- Ancient people moved their asses.
- Selection during domestication differs from selection during diversification. For the ass too?
- Expect to see Dioscorea hispida appear in spam emails very soon.
- And today’s answer to malnutrition is a blue-grin alga from Lake Chad. Kidding apart, it’s an interesting story.
Nibbles: Malnutrition, Ethanol, Kenyan tea, Ethiopian coffee, Botanic garden trends, Emmer, Vietnam fish, Guerrilla gardening, Garlic speculation, Brazil and Africa, Cactus, African veggies, Ducks and rice, Salmon
- Nepal’s malnutrition rate apparently the highest in world. But the Micronutrient Initiative is on it. But what about homegardens, I hear you ask. And rice biofortification?
- The advice I’ve been waiting for all my life: better nutrition through alcohol.
- The plight of Kenyan tea workers.
- Harlem church helps Ethiopian coffee farmers.
- Botanic gardens drop flowers, do food. About time too. And botanical art too.
- Jeremy’s farro photos.
- “Iconic” catfish in trouble due to Mekong dam. Everything is an icon these days. Something to do with post-modernism, I guess.
- Seedbomb something today. You’ll feel better.
- WTF is it with garlic in China?
- EMBRAPA reaches out to Africa.
- KARI scientists push Opuntia for livestock. Ok, but surely there are enough native desert plants in Kenya to be going on with? Well, maybe not.
- Zimbabwe market turns to sun-dried vegetables. Wish I knew what umfushwa was, though.
- The Rice-Ducks Integrated Farming System sounds like great fun.
- Why the salmon thrives in Oregon: “Tribal people have practiced a natural, sustained-yield conservation since time immemorial and are taught to plan seven generations ahead.”
Mini cows threaten to oust pocket pigs
We hate to come over all smug, but when the mainstream media pick up on a story almost a year after we first brought it to your attention, it’s hard not to. Such is the case with The Guardian’s recent discovery of the environmental and eating delights of mini cows. Our post more than a year ago featured a discussion on minicows on DAD-Net 1 which, among other things, objected to the word “miniature” because it is misleading. The Guardian has the latest on minicow taxonomy:
Micromini cattle are less than 96.5 cm tall (at the shoulder, presumably, ed.) — those shorter than 92 cm are known as “teacup cattle”.
The major outstanding question now is whether teacup cows will prove to be cuter or more adorable than pocket pigs, our number one search term. Personally, I doubt it.
Livestock breeding strategies discussed
The discussion of livestock breeding continues apace on DAD-Net, touched off by a comment on a Science paper (picked up by the BBC among others) on African livestock genomics. 2 It’s a very rich exchange, but unfortunately I can’t find a way of linking to contributions online: it seems to be entirely based on email, with no central, public archiving like with Yahoo or Google Groups. Anyway, I just want to pick out one thing. Philippe Leperre, a vet based in Laos, has this to say:
I am one of the very many specialist that advocate for selection/improvement of the local breed rather than mostly useless, haphazard, costly and non sustainable import of bulls and semen from “developed” countries. I think we are a majority in that respect, but what can we do when the local ministries and the donors prefer to buy from big foreign multinationals rather than from the (poor or at least poorer) local producers?
Now, I have two questions about this statement. To livestock breeders I’d like to ask whether they agree that there is a majority among them which advocates selection/improvement of local breeds. And to plant breeders I’d like to ask what percentage of their community would advocate such a strategy. Because it doesn’t seem to me to be anything like a majority. 3 But maybe I’m wrong.
Feedback on the CGIAR’s megaprogrammes
Speaking of the CGIAR’s change process and its mageprogrammes, they’re now soliciting comments on the one on Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health, having previously done so for the one focused on “improving the productivity of livestock and farmed fish by and for the poor.” Not a bad idea, of course. Are we going to get an opportunity to do so for the “nixed” megaprogramme on agricultural biodiversity too? And why are we hearing about these consultations via FARA rather than more directly from the CGIAR? What CGIAR RSS feed am I missing?