Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
In Bittersweet, a new column on GlobalPost, Matt McAllester writes about how food connects us and the people who cook it to faraway lands.
Last month he went looking for wild boar meat in Baghdad. Obviously like to set himself ambitious targets, our Matt. Anyway, well worth a read. Unfortunately you can’t subscribe to his stuff alone, but GlobalPost is an excellent general news site.
Good news for wild rice breeders, from Washington, DC of all places.
Funding for wild rice and forestry research cleared a Senate committee hurdle last week, said U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, DFL-Minn.
The Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved $5.5 million in agriculture and economic development initiations that include new product research for wood and wild rice research.
A $300,000 appropriation would develop new and hardier strains of wild rice, Klobuchar said. It would fund research to tackle some of the most critical problems for wild rice producers, including shattering resistance, disease resistance, germplasm retention and seed storage.
Wild rice is the only cereal grain native to North America. Minnesota is the nation’s second-largest producer of wild rice, with production concentration near the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, the Democratic senator said.
I’d really like to have heard the august US Senators debate the ins and outs of that 300 large. Maybe one of them explained what “germplasm retention” is.