Livestock

May 25, 2010May 25, 2010

Sheep mover honoured

Speaking of shepherds and their flocks trekking through Europe, one of this year’s Guardians of Diversity in the Mediterranean, awarded by Bioversity International and supported by COPEAM, was Jesus Garzón, founder of the NGO Transhumancia y Naturaleza to promote transhumance, the movement of flocks from winter quarters on the plains to mountain pastures for the summer. Here’s the video honouring Garzón at the awards ceremony.

Guardian of Mediterranean Biodiversity Jesus Garzon from Bioversity International on Vimeo.

And here’s some film shot during the transhumance.

May 24, 2010May 24, 2010

Nibbles: Endangered African breeds, Rice and bananas, AGRA, Adaptation, Old Masters

ILRI continues its attempt to take over the internet.
Dorian Fuller summarizes rice in Madagascar in a paragraph. Good trick. And for his next one he rounds up the latest on bananas. The guy’s a machine.
No adaptation without agrobiodiversity, rapt masses told. And here, like manna from heaven, is an example. Well, sort of.
Bruegel on agriculture. With picture goodness.

May 22, 2010May 23, 2010

Nibbles: Yams, AnGR, Intensification

One of the top 10 species described in 2009 is a yam. Yeah, I didn’t believe it either.
ILRI video on why it’s important to conserve livestock genetic diversity.
Edible Geography does the sort of deconstruction of Radical Cartography’s agricultural history maps that I was hoping to do but probably wouldn’t have been able to.

May 21, 2010May 21, 2010

Nibbles: Land lease, Maasai flexibility, Small farms, Coffee, coffee, coffee, Climate change, Sahelian trees, Food as drugs, Field genebanks, Chinese medicinals, Bolivian NTFP, Invasives

Dinka men despise manual labour, hence “southern Sudan might soon be on the block for having a lot of its potential farm land leased to, and worked by, foreigners”.
Maasai, on the other hand, “diversifying into cropping, by keeping fewer and faster growing animals and … taking on paying jobs”. Takes all sorts.
What is a small farm? Depends.
Coffee contains insecticides. Who knew?
Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) launched.
Central America’s coffee lands to shrink under climate change, Reuters reports. Enough! I’ve got the shakes.
Africa, meanwhile, needs technological innovations to cope.
Domesticating baobab. You know it makes sense.
Take two snacks in the morning and call me if you don’t feel any better.
Climate change will affect Portuguese ex situ plant conservation sites too.
“How best can communities conserve their medicinal plants?” A case study from China.
Bolivia could make more of its Araceae and Bromeliaceae. Couldn’t we all?
Are protected areas in Africa harbouring crop wild relatives? Just kidding: it’s invasives IUCN is talking about.

May 18, 2010July 26, 2010

Nibbles: Sorghum and rice and climate change, Pacific agrobiodiversity today and yesterday, Japanese microbiota, Wolf domestication, Organic and fungi, Crop wild relatives, Bees, Hunger, Silk

Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?