- What more do you need to know about Phylloxera?
- A dangerous fixation? Not us. Slate does nitrogen.
- What do zombies eat when they run out of brains, and other responses to famine.
- India’s government does the needful and embraces biofortified staples. Wish them luck.
- “Let’s turn the clock back 4,000 years.” Good idea. Now we have the time to read Agricultural heritage across the millennia.
Nibbles: Vigna radiata, Brit foods, Botany power, Niche models, Early ag, Fortification, Chicago plants, De-extinction, Kew aroids, Fish farming fail
- WorldVeg fights for the right of Pakistanis to grow mungbean.
- Philosopher thinks the English should fight for einkorn. Oh, and stilton.
- Botanist fights for botany.
- You gotta fight those species distribution models into submission. They don’t come quietly.
- Early farmers made love, not war. Or at least made cultic phallic symbols.
- Indians avoid Golden Rice fight by fortifying their own.
- Chicago fights to save its plants.
- You can’t fight extinction. I mean, once it’s happened.
- Aroids putting up a good fight with showier plants at Kew.
- Aquaculture in a fight for its life as disease looms.
Nibbles: Phenomics, Genomes, Indian cucurbits, Argania, Food in history, Sourghum & drought, USDA genebanks, Queenly pear, CIMMYT genebank, Malawi cowpea, Nutrition strategy
- Phenomics is the new genomics.
- No, wait. Peanuts to get a genome. A rice relative’s got one already.
- All the Cucurbitaceae of India, in one handy checklist.
- The paradox of argan oil.
- Couple of things on the history of food. And one on the ethics of food.
- Big push for drought-resistant sorghum. Wait, I thought it was drought-resistant already.
- Ft Collins gets yet another media write-up.
- Telegraph says Queen gets rare pear. Letter writer to Times begs to differ on the whole rarity thing. It sounds like, damn thing being (mostly) behind a paywall.
- If you’re on Facebook, why not like this photo of the CIMMYT maize genebank?
- Canada to help Malawi diversify. Into cowpeas.
- Big report on big nutrition meeting. Big deal?
Nibbles: Nutrition, Expanding corn, Wheat prices, Veg from space, Seed saving film, Gender
Things are slim today, mostly only tangentially related to agricultural biodiversity. But we hate to disappoint…
- The ever-influential Lancet has published a series on non-communicable diseases (many of which are associated with dietary diversity). Marion Nestle has the details.
- The USDA’s conservation program is fighting a losing battle against high corn prices, and everybody suffers (except corn farmers).
- Sell wheat? Prices are high, but forecasts are good.
- Vegscape! If you need a “state-of-the-art, satellite-based U.S. crop condition vegetation assessment and monitoring service”.
- Now this really is agrobiodiverse: A high definition film on seed saving that needs your support.
- This one too: women and bambara groundnut.
Evolution strikes back
Ford Denison drew attention to this astonishing photograph of giant ragweed 1 lording it over a crop of harvest-ready maize.
Nothing unusual about that — being a giant anything gives you a licence to lord it over lowlier things. The point, of course, is that the corn crop is Round-up ready and so, of course, is the weed. More facts and figures at The International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds.
Ford also pointed to an interesting discussion on the difficulties of defining anything as slippery as farming philosophy by talking about what is and isn’t permitted.
To give the consumer a clear, black and white choice, organic marketing strategy offers a black and white world where all human-made pesticides and fertilizers, and all genetically modified crops are bad, regardless of their value to farmers or to sustainability. Even limited use is prohibited because it would blur the marketing lines.
Amen. Although let’s not forget that good old-fashioned soft soap is as human-made as anything. In the old days, I always advised beginning allotmenteers to blitz an unkempt plot with glyphosate and then get as holy as you like about being organic. Nothing is more soul-destroying than discovering couch grass or ground elder infesting the asparagus and strawberry beds. Of course, today, it might take more than glyphosate.