- Diverse strains + diverse substrates = diverse shiitake.
- Chocolate is from Mars. Jeremy comments: “A disease called witches”??? BBC Science reporting strikes again. Get the USDA’s version.
- Eldis on a roll this morning: Livestock and climate change in Africa, sustainability of Chinese agriculture, beyond magic bullets in African agriculture.
- EurekAlert! tries to catch up: Mexican landraces.
- Quality assured potato genebank.
Nibbles: Vegetarianism, Home gardening, Climate change, Pigs squared
- Meat is not murder.
- Agribusiness wants to keep you on your allotment and off their back.
- Britons ignore agribusiness in search of The Good Life.
- Talkfest on adapting West African agriculture to climate change.
- Natural feeding regime produces unhealthier pigs that grow more slowly.
- Yeah but I bet these ones taste better!
Nibbles: Old maize, News, World Bank, Organic, Bees, Breeding, Svalbard, Genebank management, Cattle, Fibre
- Maize in the Dominican Republic 1500 years ago. Luigi comments: I see that and raise you wheat in Turkey 8,500 years ago.
- CTA announces news aggregator service. Yes, we feature. Via.
- World Bank country data mashed up with Google Maps. Not as useful as it might be.
- Organic farming researchers meet in Modena. Not all sweetness and light, though.
- BBC podcast on the troubles affecting bees.
- Breeders told to develop really hairy plants to combat warming.
- Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes list of world’s biggest science projects. No comment.
- CIP documents genebank use cases on youtube.
- The perils of herding zebu in Madagascar.
- Ancient Egyptians made cool ropes, but of what?
Smell this
Will perfume smell more delicious if the labdanum in it has been scraped off the beards of Cretan goats?
Ah, how I love to meander the byways of economic biology. Who knew that Cretan rock roses (Cistus creticus) produce a resin called labdanum? That labdanum, among many other uses, is a base note in perfume not unlike the fabled ambergris? Or that the best quality labdanum is gathered adventitiously, as it were, by goats grazing on Cretan herbage (rather like that civet-cat coffee)?
I didn’t either. But now you can too, thanks to the Human Flower Project.
Livestock policies come alive
Our friends at Wrenmedia, who are responsible, among other things, for New Agriculturalist, have recently branched out into moving pictures. A series of presentations accompany an FAO project on pro-poor livestock policy and institutional change. They’re up on Youtube; here’s the one on Burkina Faso:
Maybe they’ll be tempted to enter something in The Competition?