Caught this on a recent trip to Venice. It’s embedded in an outside wall of St Mark’s Basilica. Agrobiodiversity was more crucial to iconography back in the Middle Ages, I guess.
Pocket pigs find a use
After more than three decades of breed conservation and selection, a livestock research station in southeastern Taiwan has made a name for itself by selling minipigs locally for experimental purposes.
Are these minipigs the same as pocket pigs? Oh, I do hope so.
Nibbles: Food photos, Phenology, Breadfruit, Medicinal plant gardens, Animal quiz, Soil agrobiodiversity, Cloning
- World Bank food snaps.
- Looks like there is phenotypic selection on flowering time.
- Workshop on revitalizing breadfruit in Hawaii. If you go, let us know.
- Sacred Seeds gardens around the world.
- How much do you know about animal production and health? FAO wants to know.
- CIAT now looking at soil biodiversity.
- Boffins can now clone plants as seeds. Clever, but is it good?
A great quiz, not so well done
I was thrilled to see a Tweet from Farming First asking How much do you know about agriculture, nutrition and health? Lots, and I love online quizzes and the opportunity to show off. Who doesn’t? So I hurried on over, to discover a quiz from IFPRI, tied to the meeting on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition & Health, which opens tomorrow in New Delhi. 1 It is really nice, with a good mix of questions and types of answers. I only really carped at one, pictured over there. Perhaps you can guess why. Anyway, I had a good time answering all the questions, definitely stumped for a few. Discovered I had to give them all sorts of demographic information; well, there’s no free lunch. So now can I have my results and the obligatory share this with all your friends or we’ll hate you forever link? No such luck. Instead I got sent to the answers, 2 and instructions to give myself one point for every right answer and zero for wrong answers. But not my own answers, right or wrong. I couldn’t precisely remember them either, and we all know how easy it is to misremember in one’s favour. I think I got five wrong, four if we can have an argument about the way the question was worded. I did get the mosquito question right, because I knew what they meant, even if they didn’t.
Bottom line: It’s a good quiz, worth spending a few minutes on.
Nibbles: CBNRM, Extension, Seed systems, Climate change book and conferences, Cassava, Endophytes, Old Irish Goats, Plant Cuttings, Ethnobotany, Weeds
- Designing the next generation of community-based natural resource management projects. No agriculture. Weird. Well, not so much actually.
- Extension systems have a website! Yeah but do they need one?
- Informal seed system working just fine in Indian Himalayas. So maybe the extension system is not needed? But, hey, they have a website, did I mention that?
- Climate Change and Crop Production: The Book. And: The Conference. No but wait, here’s another.
- The unusual crop that is cassava.Yeah, but in The Economist?
- ” …among the largest collections of endophytes…” Not a lot of people know that.
- Old Irish goats (and others, to be fair) meet to talk about, well, Old Irish goats.
- The great Plant Cuttings.
- How to design an ethnobotanical garden. Would coca find a place?
- Musings on the evolution of weeds.