- If you love water, here are 35 ways to save it. Part 1 and Part 2, 3 & 4 to come.
- I love the idea of tattooed apples.
- How can you not love low-arsenic rice varieties from Bangladesh? Maybe because they might be opening a hornets’ nest.
- The video camera loves farmers, and the feeling’s mutual. Extension is ready for its close-up.
- It’s a short step from over-exploitation to domestication. Lovely news for …
- … Malagasy farmers, who could love their wild yams to death. Good thing they’re nuts for cultivated yams.
- Darwinian Agriculture embraces a well-argued contrary view, even though Ford doesn’t necessarily agree.
- I like the idea of an online almanac for local climate change observations, but I’d love it even more if it went global.
- The ever-contrary Matt Ridley is happy to reaffirm his love for intensive agriculture because “with cheap light, an urban, multi-story hydroponic warehouse the size of Delaware could feed the world, leaving the rest for wilderness”.
- Gene Logsdon would love to see this headline: “Monsanto retreating before invading pigweed hordes.” Dream on, Gene.
- And what would today be without chocolate? I love that things are never as simple as they seem, even in the realm of Theobroma cacao.
Nibbles: Maize genes, Livestock domestication, Guinea fowl, Plant identification, Juniper conservation, Cacao conservation, Seed talk, IPBES report, Global consultation
- Today’s genomic breakthrough involves kernel number in maize.
- Neolithic people overhunted, then thought better of it.
- Was guinea fowl ever domesticated, I wonder?
- How to figure out if you’ve looked hard enough. For plants, that is. And some discussion.
- Gin is in trouble. But help is at hand.
- A workshop on chocolate and vanilla. My kinda event. And chocolate does need help. Gin, chocolate. Pretty soon life wont be worth living.
- Simran Sethi’s Twitter chat after TEDxManhattan was storified, but it’s gone now of course. Try this instead.
- Final say on that IPBES-1 gabfest.
- And the first say on that “Global Consultation on agricultural biodiversity for sustainable food security” thing.
Nibbles: Yarsagumba, Chocolate meet & dig, Beer dig, Mapping disease, Mapping language, Going digital, Urban ag meet, Weird citrus, CGIAR genebanks and more, Microbiome
- Off-colour jokes pumped out with abandon as Viagra fungus splashed all over headlines.
- Two of my favourite words in one conference: sustainable and chocolate. Can I get some archaeology with that? Yes, you can. Trifecta!
- Prefer beer to chocolate? We’ve got you covered.
- Sudden oak death mapping gets all interactive. Will nobody do something similar for agrobiodiversity?
- The geography of the onion. No, not The Onion. And not interactive.
- Go online, young scientist! Even if it involves giving banana research priority setting a Facebook page? Well, why not.
- Whoa, there’s an Urban Agriculture Summit?
- Citrus australasica? Seriously?
- CGIAR crown jewels safe at last. No off-colour headlines, please.
- Some genebanks doing ok, others not so much.
- Gut microbiome kinda sorta implicated in kwashiorkor. And more from NYT.
Nibbles: Cluster archive, Plant Press, Yet more quinoa, African viruses, African veggies, Slum livestock, Protected area monitor, Chinese rice variety, Talking shops, PGR course
- Another website archiving phylogenetic trees? What are the odds? Well, they are different animals.
- Did we ever link to The Plant Press? If not, we should have.
- The quinoa controversy rumbles on. We’ve got that covered too. And since you’re at it, why not help revise the descriptors?
- Bad news for Africa: plant viruses. Ah but there are varieties for that problem, no? No? Well, you can always highlight the little blighters as research priorities.
- Good news for Africa: local vegetables.
- Sort of good news for Africa, I guess: livestock in slums.
- New website keeps an eye on Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement. Interactively, natch. Well, actually, not so much. Can’t export, or import. Maybe the mash-up will fix that. Anyway, most protected areas are in the wrong place, aren’t they?
- Conserving Chinese rice, one variety at the time.
- Latest installment of The Economist’s Feeding the World thing is happening right now, and you can follow it on Twitter using #feedingtheworld. Or maybe you’d like to re-imagine agriculture with the CGIAR instead?
- Apply for the latest installment of Wageningen’s PGR course.
Nibbles: Wikipedia, Cheese labels, Chickpea genome, Snake gourd, Phenotyping services, Politics, Sustainability on NUS, Brassica review
- Natural History Museum wants a wikipedian. So, in a different way, does Crops for the Future.
- The poetry of New York cheese labels.
- Another crop genome bites the dust.
- Kew contemplates the snake gourd.
- Now you can outsource your experiments.
- Strange bedfellows: small organic farmers and the Tea Party, a marriage made in Nebraska.
- Got research on underutilized species (or indeed sustainable food chains) you think you might like to publish?
- The OECD publishes a huge study of the biology of Brassica crops. Yes, the OECD.