Category: Mainstream

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Nibbles: Industrial diversity, Forget feed the world, Vegetable evolution, Housekeeping

Slightly extended, slightly fewer edition

  • Corn (maize) and soybeans are the bogeymen of industrialised, monocropping agriculture, striking fear into the heart of biodiversity lovers everywhere. But, surprisingly, in the US, more than half the production comes from farms that grow at least two other crops. For real specialisation, you need to look at hay and rice. Big tip of the hat to Big Picture Agriculture for that one.
  • And yet, corn and soybeans power the rhetoric of “US farmers feed the world,” despite more than 40% of US corn ending up as ethanol. (See what I did there?) Anyway, Margaret Mellon at the Union of Concerned Scientists thinks its time to move beyond that unhelpful phrase. “It is time,” she says, “to separate the issues of hunger alleviation and crop production.” It is way beyond time, I say.
  • And then there’s this: “More Vegetables Evolving Chocolate-Sauce-Filled Centers As Evolutionary Imperative.”
  • And we’re feeling an evolutionary imperative to shift this particular parasite to a new host. We’ll be attempting to do so over the weekend. With luck, you won’t notice a think when we resume on Monday. See you then.
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Giant fruit update

For some reason, this seems to be the time of year which the media sets aside for stories on large fruits. Or largish, anyway. Because I may be spoilt by my time in the tropics, but this “Avozilla” doesn’t look like such a big avocado to me. I was hoping I’d be able to be more precise about this, but I couldn’t find systematic characterization data on the world’s avocado collections, not even in GRIN. And no, I’m not impressed that Avozilla has its own Twitter account either:

And likewise, 14-15 grams is not bad for an olive, but there’s bigger, and not all of them are from Italy.

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Nibbles: Landscapes pod, Tartiness evolution, Diversity pix, Eve Crowley vid, Commons debate, Subsidies, Arabidopsis database, Beard beer, Kew herbarium vid, Minoan pests, FDish seeds, Extinction is forever

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Nibbles: Kenyan millet, Nutritious fruits, Homegardens, Schools, CIAT genebank funding

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One more cup of coffee

For some reason, there’s been a sackful of coffee stories lately. Here’s a quick summary:

“Pistols for two, and coffee for one.”

“[Coffee] is of excellent Use in the time of Pestilence, and contributes greatly to prevent the spreading of Infection.”

“We just had to try at least a cup in every village we stopped at, and as they were small cups, sometimes more than one… The irony is that I am a ‘tea-only girl’.”

“Yes, Starbucks has announced it’s taking up shop in Bogota, Colombia. It says it wants to celebrate Colombian coffee.”

“Here, we do not work hard for survival, but we work hard to live a better life; that is what I’ve learned from working on this plantation.”

“In order to create these pre-breeding populations with enough genetic diversity for these economically important traits, WCR 1 will utilize genetic material from the current germplasm collections as well as new material coming from wild populations from the WCR GERMPLASM Project.”