- Ipomoea aquatica in the news.
- DNA extraction made fun.
- Samoa launches breadfruit beer.
- Gin maker protects his livelihood.
- The Treaty goes to Green Week.
Nibbles: Pig evolution, Genomics field guide, Genome editing, Chilean agroecology training, Oxford Farming Conferences, Grape variety database, Food prices database, Amazonian history, Debunking tomatoes, INFOODS NUS list, Coptic gardens, Aid agencies map
The catching up continues:
- “Genomics is a powerful tool…”: Pigs speciate, admix, fly.
- But in the wrong hands…
- I wonder which types of hands these genome editors have.
- Ok, enough of that. Women, agroecology, capacity building, a fashionable country: what’s not to like?
- I wonder if any of the ladies are at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. Or were. They were probably NOT at the Oxford Farming Conference. Oh the wit of these alternative farming types. You could have followed both on Twitter, were you so minded, and less confused than I.
- Chile — for it is she — of course grows a lot of grapes. Want to know which varieties? Course you do.
- Damn, grapes not included in this World Bank crowd-sourced food price dataset. Which I think we may have linked to before, but what the hell.
- I know we’ve linked to ancient Amazonian civilization stuff before, but this is a predictive model, no less.
- Busted: The tomato.
- The INFOODS “List of underutilized species contributing to the Nutritional Indicators for Biodiversity” is out. Prices not included.
- I somehow thought there would be more underutilized species in this Ethiopian monastery.
- Who pays for (some of) this? Check out the Guardian’s interactive map of European development agencies.
Nibbles: Information, Domestication, Cats, Conference, Gunpowder gardening, Policy advice, Potatoes, Ancient vineyards, New UG99, Bovine emissions, Cacao ants, Palaeo-diet, Bloody quinoa, Tokyo’s honey, Urban biodiversity, Ilex, Conifers
- Wow! Just wow. Big Picture Agriculture has launched an incredibly useful website.
- Chromosomes, crops and superdomestication, a slideshare presentation by Pat Heslop-Harrison.
- Cats, domesticated? Not as far as I’m concerned. Still, Ancient Chinese cats ate rats, leading to their domestication.
- Independent plant breeders, a conference just for you.
- Great ammunition for the lazy gardener.
- IBPES told to “tap the wisdom of indigenous peoples”.
- Kenyan policymakers told to consider the potato.
- Basque vineyards of a millennium ago.
- A new strain of UG99 wheat rust? But this time, the world is ready.
- Variable diets linked to variable emissions shock.
- scidev.net reports that ants protect cacao trees from fungal diseases. (Yes, I’m taking short cuts here.)
- Palaeolithic people preferred nutrition-rich places.
- And quinoa remains as confusing as ever.
- Tokyo’s local honey.
- Although agriculture barely features in a paean to urban biodiversity. It should.
- The holly and the coffee: The Botanist in the Kitchen does Yerba Maté
- Ready for the inevitable ennui of next Christmas, a taxonomy of conifers.
Nibbles: Ecosystem services, EU hearing, Competition, Stagnant yields, Abandoned croplands, Ferments
We’re almost out of here, until 6 January 2014. Till then …
- Possibly the best current explanation of why ecosystem services are worth paying for. Stay with it.
- Would you like to see Roberto Papa tell the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee what he thinks of the proposals on plant reproductive material? Thought so.
- Young agricultural blogger? CTA wants to hear from you for the YoBloCo awards.
- Nature’s on a roll lately: Crop yields are growing arithmetically, and you can stuff that in your anti-Malthusian stocking.
- What, then, to do with Eastern Europe’s abandoned croplands?
- Maybe we could ferment them.
Nibbles: Homegardens, Ancient grains, Homeless hens, Data data data, New maize, ICRISAT ambassadors, Wine microbes, India, Soil Day
- Emma Cooper blogs her ethnobotanical MSc dissertation on British homegardeners and their cool crops.
- If she’d done her work in Sweden, she’d have written about Ragnar Pettersson and his “treasure of Ardre.”
- The downside of backyard farming: homeless hens.
- International e-Conference on Germplasm Data Interoperability: Genebank Database Hell gets an e-conference. What could possibly go wrong.
- Apparently there’s a new way to search for agricultural bibliografic (sic) data.
- CIMMYT gets its maize out there.
- ICRISAT is not one to hide its light under a bushel either.
- Aussies to survey their yeasts and bacteria to improve winemaking.
- The problems of India: “It takes a particular brand of incompetence and neglect for decades of stellar growth to have no apparent impact on India’s sky-high levels of under-nutrition.” I bet Dreze and Sen didn’t include a food bubble. Hey, but that can be exported.
- Oh and happy World Soil Day! Thanks to it, and Jim Croft, I now know Australia has a sort of soil genebank.