- Sometimes all it takes is a goat.
- Or a camel.
- I wonder how either would figure into a metric for a sustainable diet. Wonder if these people will be interested in those metrics.
- Cassava figures in lots of different ways.
- No word on whether carbon dioxide will affect its nutrient content the way it does with other crops.
- Who cares, it’s yield we’re after. Well, that’s in trouble too in some parts of Africa.
- That’s the only way those African seed start-ups are going to survive.
- Yeah, but disease resistance is important, Shirley. PlantVillage gets a blog.
- And weeds? Don’t forget the weeds. Although of course some of them you can eat. Put that in your metrics.
- Meanwhile, France starts to re-wild. Would love to see some wild relatives in the Bois du Boulogne. Livestock wild relatives, not your crazy cousin on his gap year.
- And now we can figure out what climate change might do to them. I guess this thing might work for European animals. Says here it works for Australian trees.
- Speaking of France, garlic is quintessentially French, isn’t it? Well, maybe, but it’s also very Korean, in its black, cured form.
Nibbles: Extreme aquaculture, GMO ver. 2.0, Wheat genebank, Infrared coffee spectroscopy, Farmer photos, Land grab, Reindeer herder photos, Mapping blight, Food security software, Fragaria moschata
- Farming cobia off Panama. Look it up.
- Gene editing is the future. But is it GM?
- More on the CIMMYT genebank from the Australian press. Get a room already.
- Fancy machine can tell fancy Yemeni coffee from lesser stuff. No, not DNA. Producers of lesser stuff unavailable for comment.
- Some of them may end up being photographed by National Geographic though.
- Before being forced off their land.
- Different sort of land grab in the Gran Chaco. Pity those poor wild Arachis. And here’s a meta-analysis of the drivers of the problem.
- Feeling left out, herders get fancy photos too.
- “The data indicates a broad distribution of this clone from Spain to Russia and Scotland to Cypress.” Good grief. Potato blight, if you’re still interested.
- From household survey data to food security assessment: The software.
- The bubbleberry is increasingly a thing.
Nibbles: New plant journal, Randomized trials under fire, WB to the rescue, Spirit in the sky, Please sir may I have some more, Flour powerless, Tom Payneless, Collecting for CIP, Regen redux, Cultivating my garden, Animal Crackers, Ethnomycology
- Nature has new Plants journal. With blog.
- More from the randomized trials backlash frontlines.
- World Bank sets up internal task force on climate smart agriculture. Oh good.
- No word on whether spiritual values on agenda.
- Hacking the school lunch.
- Indian flour mills winding down. Implications for crop diversity unknown.
- Big Australian writeup of CIMMYT genebank.
- Big CIP writeup of CIP genebank. And other collections, to be fair.
- It’s the regeneration, stupid.
- Gardens save plants.
- Sustainable diets defined to within an inch of their lives. Common factor is less animal products. But, as Susan McMillan of ILRI points out, for whom, and where?
- Traditional Maori use of weird fungus.
Yeah. Diversity is nice, but…
I find the whole debate about Golden Rice pretty boring. Not because I don’t think the subject — GR in and of itself, and as a symbol of something bigger — is important. Rather, because I think it’s very important to have a debate, but the way this is being conducted at the moment is just not likely, it seems to me, to lead to anything more than the further entrenchment of fixed positions.
For example, if you want a good encapsulation of (one side of) the wider argument, you could do a lot worse than this, from Richard Manning in Mother Earth News:
…the industrial ag folks and the Green Revolutionaries challenge us: “Yeah. Diversity is nice, but can sustainable agriculture feed the world’s population?” And then they rig the game by defining “feed” in just the same way they define agriculture — a narrow, linear process of input, throughput, output, yield per acre, calories per bushel, calories per person.
Now that’s hip and engaging, and makes its point in accessible, pithy fashion; but look at the tone — that disdainful “yeah” — and the loaded words used — words like “rig.” A couple of days ago, even before I’d seen this article, I was sort of indirectly accused on Twitter of not caring if children go blind from Vitamin A deficiency, because I had said that the debate — if it can even be called that — had become sterile: it’s not so sterile if you have VAD, was the counter. Right. That’s the reductio ad absurdum of the sort of the tone and language of the Manning article.
So it’s very welcome to see that Michael Pollan and Pamela Ronald, poster children for the two sides of the argument, have recently engaged in what has been described as a “respectful dialogue.” Hopefully more details will emerge, and a precedent will have been set, and we can move on from the boring — there’s really no other word for it — spectacle of people talking past each other.
LATER: And here it is, all two hours of it.
Nibbles: City farming, Yeast diversity, Fungal taxonomy, Ankole cattle, Fruit breeding, Goat improvement, Private hunger, Vietnam cacao, Sequencing life, Old vegetables, Cola politics, Lugar Center, Wither biofuels, Plant breeder award, Amateur potato breeding
- “Fifteen to twenty percent of the world’s food is produced through urban farming, involving an estimated 800 million people.”
- We shaped yeasts as much as they shaped us. Now to sort out their nomenclature, along with the rest of the benighted fungal kingdom.
- Cheese is just one way yeasts shaped us. What kind of cheese can you make from Ankole milk, I wonder.
- Sean Myles tells us how his lab “makes food better.”
- Tan Sonstegard of USDA tells us how ADAPTMap can make goats better. Skip to 2 mins in, if you want to avoid adorable footage of cute (human) kids. I love a nice bit of goat cheese.
- Can the private sector help combat hunger and malnutrition? Gee, I dunno, do tell me.
- Vietnamese chocolate comes of age. Someone mention the private sector?
- Gene jockeys take over world. World surrenders.
- What did the Elizabethans ever do for us? Well, they grew funky vegetables for one thing.
- Both Colas sign up to FAO guidelines that “protect the rights of poor and vulnerable people to land, livelihoods and food security.” But is it all marketing?
- The Lugar Center has a bunch of bibliographic resources for researchers.
- Biofuels? Bah, humbug.
- Jorge Dubcovsky, a professor of plant sciences at the University of California–Davis, snags another award.
- “Are you all converts to the cause of backyard potato breeding?” Do tell. And so we come full circle.