- Tequila plant is possible sweetener for diabetics. Talk about a waste of raw material.
- Would you Adam and Eve it? Women do not own 2% of the land. What next for the killer factcheck?
- In related news, teacup pigs are a fraud.
- Quinoa to feed the world, in Spanish.
- The rice warrior! Isn’t that overegging the pudding just a smidgen?
- Learn about plant genetic resources and seeds at Wageningen University.
- African Agriculture Technology Foundation “to avail adequate quality seeds at the right time and affordable price”. You might think some of the folks at the AATF should avail themselves of Wageningen’s course.
- Tough, flavoursome and bug resistant. Not Richard Markham, but a tomato bred specially for the Solomon Islands he’s talking about.
- Kew’s new global kitchen cookbook narrowly avoids being crushed by bandwagon trundling by.
- Cover crops are even more valuable than previously thought shock.
- Indigenous sheep breeds even more valuable than previously thought shock.
Nibbles: Genebanks trifecta, Marley Coffee, Sorghum noodles, Biofortification Q&A, African oils, Cow diversity, Coffee course, Fructose deconstructed, Vanuatu chocolate, Candy bar phylogenies, Japanese copycats, Charger beer
- CIP’s genebank in the limelight.
- Egypt’s genebank in the limelight.
- Australia’s genebank in the limelight. Limelight fast running out…
- Ah, but genebanks not the only ones with cool videos: farmers in the limelight.
- Yeah, it’s not just about the genebanks. Markets can help, I suppose. Especially if you have a famous name.
- As with coffee, so with sorghum. Biofortified or not. All we need now is an agribusiness incubator, and here it is, courtesy of ICRISAT. But what will Japanese farmers think?
- Same again for assorted African oils?
- The diversity of cows has been driven by markets too.
- Coffee 101 at UCDavis. Maybe they’ll invite Mr Marley to teach.
- You want fructose in that coffee? No, probably not.
- Maybe you prefer chocolate. From Vanuatu, natch. Looks like high quality stuff too, but even crap chocolate has its uses, like teaching taxonomy for instance.
- No, you’re more a Japanese bourbon person, aren’t you? Wait, do you need barley for that? I’m sure those young Japanese farmers will be all over this.
The truth about the DDR’s coffee
Many thanks to my colleague Amanda Dobson for this photo (click to embiggen) from the DDR Museum in Berlin. Sometimes one prefers a little less agricultural biodiversity in one’s food — and beverages — doesn’t one?
A cassava for the ages in Hawaii
Probably the biggest cassava you’ve ever seen, weighing in at about 80 kg. No word on what variety it is, alas, nor how long it was in the ground for.
Nibbles: Plant Guardians, Peruvian Solanum, Sunflower genomics, California drought, Brazil drought, Sri Lankan tea, Minnesota wine, Seed of Hope, Sugarcane engineering, King Cotton, Rubber boom
- Do you want to be a Plant Guardian?
- Some people are already getting busy guarding Solanum in Peru.
- The sunflower family gets a molecular makeover.
- What the California drought means for food.
- And the one in Brazil for coffee.
- And tea in Sri Lanka is also in trouble, though for once drought is not to blame.
- Minnesota has a wine industry thanks to wild relatives. But I won’t hold that against them.
- In today’s Seeds of X story, X=hope and the place is Aceh.
- If sugarcane was a cold-tolerant oil-producing crop, would it still be sugarcane?
- Cotton has a lot to answer for. Or rather, the people who grew it do. Or did. Oh crap.
- Rubber too. Though not as much. I guess. Oh crap.