- Move over Juan Valdez. Cacao farmers want to emulate a marketing icon.
- Urban agriculture not all it’s cracked up to be. Living up to that urban ag icon, Cuba, is hard.
- Bali’s iconic, traditional subaks are a complex adaptive system, and much better than modern rice farming alternatives. Makes you wonder why they need protecting, though.
- GM bananas will save us. Not by themselves they wont. I don’t know why I keep linking to this stuff. Nothing at all iconic about it.
- Iconic taxonomic revision tools online.
- Something else that’s online is a bunch of tools for analyzing genebank data. Soon to be iconic, no doubt. As soon as people use them. So get cracking.
- Huge BBC documentary on Kew coming up. I bet the iconic Millennium Seed Bank will feature.
- Speaking of iconic genebank buildings, today’s one comes from Australia.
- The history of an iconic Middle Easter tree?
- The philosophy of an iconic Italian delicacy. Well, Neapolitan, really.
- And in honour of the World Cup (I refuse to put FIFA in front, let them sue me), an iconic Brazilian dish. And don’t worry, those beans are safe. Somewhere iconic.
Nibbles: Climate change & yields, Eucalyptus genome, Pacific breeders, Iranian barley breeders, Food Policy Report 2013, Titan, Gluten allergy, FGR podcast, Rice culture, NERICA and gender, WCC2014, CWR article, Malnutrition myths, Halophytes
- Yeah, on this climate change thing? We’re doomed.
- Oh crap, there’s another genome: eucalyptus this time. Here’s the paper, you geeks. Great news for koalas, whose genome we still await, incidentally. Yeah, where are we with that?
- SPC trains some breeders with Treaty money.
- I wonder if they were told about Evolutionary Plant Breeding.
- IFPRI has its new food policy report out. More on this later from us, I suspect.
- The Bonn Titan Arum blooms! Well, I’m calling it a crop wild relative.
- That gluten allergy? Don’t blame modern wheat varieties.
- Podcast on the importance of genetic resources to sustainable forests.
- Why rice? The Filipino view.
- And the African view. NERICA’s good for women. And bad.
- Bioversity blogs about World Cocoa Conference 2014, gets dates wrong. It’s on now.
- Crop wild relatives in The Scientist. But I’m biased…
- Busting malnutrition myths. Because they’re there.
- There’s probably a few myths out there about halophytes too.
Nibbles: Neolithic farmers, Minoan DNA, Cretan food, Olive history book, Organic dreams, Fairtrade experiment, Value chains, Jamaican breadfruit exports, Climate smart successes
- Neolithic farmers spread into Europe by sea.
- And it looks like the ones who got to Crete eventually gave rise to the Minoans.
- And ate food not unlike what Cretans ate up to a hundred years ago.
- Well of course the olive is important to all that.
- Ten thousand years later, we find that organic is an impossible dream.
- And Fairtrade may or may not work.
- But value chains will make you free. Although that’s easier said than done.
- And you have to be climate-smart to boot. Really, who’d be a farmer, in the Neolithic or now.
Nibbles: De Schutter, Madagascar beans, Beer!, Cocktails!, CIAT strategy, Segenet, FGR, Risotto again, Domestication, Quinoa, Medieval workplan, Late blight
- “Productivism” skewered one last time. Until the next time.
- The Malagasy Bean Renaissance. No, really.
- The science of beer foam. Now there’s no excuse.
- Cocktails can be biodiverse too. You bet they can.
- CIAT’s new strategy makes a splash. Genebank front and centre.
- New ICIPE director tells all. She used to work at CIAT, did you know?
- First edition of The State of the World’s Forest Genetic Resources is out. Now to do something about it.
- Italy’s traditional rices preserved. Yes, Italy’s, you heard me.
- Agriculture was invented in the current interglacial. Why then, and not in the Eemian?
- Quinoa macronutrients exzzzzzzzamined.
- Your what-to-do-now guide to the medieval farm. Progress? Not what it’s cracked up to be.
- People of the Toluca valley! Expect researchers looking for wild potato genes resistant to late blight.
Nibbles: Linux lettuce, Climate intelligence, European ag & CC, Italian forests, Sweet potato chains, Aroid podcast, Beer trifecta, CWR everywhere
- Totally forgot if we already linked to this latest pean to open source seed.
- Climate-smart agriculture described in three paragraphs.
- Hope someone explains it to European farmers, and soon.
- Italy is increasingly wooded. But only because farms are being abandoned. Maybe not climate-smart enough?
- If only those farms had better links to markets, like in E. Africa…
- Dutch food writer on the Jewish (maybe) origins of the Surinamese national dish. Gotta love edible aroids. Jeremy does his podcast thing.
- Step 1: Breed your hops.
- Step 2: Find a funky yeast.
- Step 3: Crack the Kenyan beer market.
- Back to real life: USAID’s brand new multisectoral nutrition policy. Now, then, what’s the betting that the agricultural interventions supported by USAID avoided the risks that such things often hold for nutrition (incomes, prices, types of products, women social status and workload, sanitary environment and inequalities)?
- SeedMap.org breaks down crop wild relatives.
- Somebody mention crop wild relatives? Yes, Sandy Knapp.
- Somebody mention parientes silvestres de cultivos? Yes, Nora Castañeda.
- How many CWR will go the way of Arabidopsis? Because southern populations of that species in genebanks are already doing better than local populations in northern sites.
- How many crop wild relatives in Kew’s meadows?