- Dahlias: good to look at, good to eat.
- Why agriculture bypassed herbaceous perennials, until now.
Nibbles: India, City chicks, Rooftop gardens, Black cherry, Prairie grasses, Oryza SNP
- ICRISAT recommends diversity to cope with climate change in India.
- US urban farmers “mad as wet hens“. City chicks?
- US urban farmers with a view to die for.
- CWR becomes nuisance when free of soil pathogen.
- Convicts help with germplasm regeneration and multiplication.
- The “gold-standard set of curated polymorphisms” for rice.
Nibbles: Bees, Weeds, Free fruit, Flour, Bombus
- Colony collapse disorder: where are we now?
- Weedkiller diversity essential to maintain weed susceptibility.
- Eat the streets.
- Ancient Grains Flour Blend. A baker asks: Whatever next?
- Bumblebee beauty.
Senate discusses wild rice
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.
Keeping their heads – and crops – above water
The BBC has a multi-media feature from Bangladesh called “Life above the Floods.” It looks at how the people of Char Atra, a low-lying silt island in the middle of the Ganges, cope with the yearly ravages of the monsoon’s flooding. Which will no doubt get worse as sea levels rise due to global climate change. I hate to say it, but there’s really not much that agricultural biodiversity will be able to do to help these people adapt to the effects of a global 2 degree C increase in temperatures.