Livestock

March 18, 2008March 19, 2008

Nibbles: Ug99, potato flour, rats, bees, cats, horses

CABI blog summarizes Ug99 situation after one year.
Let them eat potato croissants! Or so says Peruvian military.
Boffin finds rats are diverse. Allrightythen.
As if bees don’t have enough to worry about.
Pussy scientists, in the news.
BurkinabÃ© horse festival.

March 17, 2008March 17, 2008

Nibbles: Bees, weird food, wagyu cattle, medieval agriculture, beer

India to research bees in detail.
Yak knob to go with your yak milk, sir?
George Lucas does his bit to conserve a weird cattle breed, the Japanese wagyu. Well, kinda.
Was the typical English village founded around 900 AD as a result of monastically-driven agricultural innovation?
Diverse healthy reasons to drink beer; Luigi unavailable for comment.

March 14, 2008March 15, 2008

Nibbles: AGRA, Andean potatoes, farmer factsheets, tequila, Dogon, yak milk

AGRA’s first eight PhD students get to work.
Papa Andina Regional Initiative assessed by CGIAR CAPrI. Can’t be bothered reading the whole thing? Try this.
Factsheets for farmers in Kenya and Uganda; Luigi’s MIL not available for comment.
Tequila for lunch: Jeremy comments: “Wish I could be at this seminar, at the University of California, Davis”.
Dogon agriculture 101.
Got yak milk?

March 12, 2008March 12, 2008

Nibbles: Donkey, women, bees, databases

Archaeological evidence of donkey domestication from Egypt.
Empower women farmers to ensure food security. Sounds like a plan.
Good reporter visits good bee research centre. Read all about it.
Genomics blog discovers CGIAR databases, love at first sight.

March 11, 2008March 11, 2008

Nibbles: New Agriculturist, nutrition

Latest New Agriculturist online with nice piece on the alpaca y mucho mas…
A call for the consumption of more traditional foods in Botswana — “one-stop shop for the best health and nutrition.”

1. What has agrobiodiversity ever done for us? Kent Nnadozie of the Plant Treaty lays it out.
2. Michael Frei of the HealthyDiets4Africa project doesn’t need it laid out.
3. Neither do the people who awarded a prize to Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
4. What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
5. Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
6. Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
7. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
8. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
9. Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
10. And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
11. And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
12. Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
13. You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
14. I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
15. Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.
16. No, not using ancient DNA, but actually…
Published on April 4, 2025