- Cool new use for hot peppers: fungicides, for agriculture and human health.
- Community Knowledge Workers transformed into “Mobile Banana Disease Monitors”.
- Grain “call[s] on African peasants to resist and protect their agriculture, as they have always done”.
- Near Corvallis, Ore, USA? Wanna tour the genebank? Wanna write it up for us?
- New World Catalogue of Potato Varieties. A pedant asks: “Any Old World varieties in there?”
- Germany is said to be demanding entire Rumanian wheat crop, also part of what is left over from 1938 crop. Orwell’s approaching war.
- Saving the Angora goat in the US.
“Barley-wheat” explained
There’s a National Agricultural Science Museum on ICAR’s the Indian Agricultural Research Institute’s Pusa Campus ((In a separate post I’ll explain why it’s called the Pusa Campus.)) and I spent an enjoyable hour or so wandering around it during my recent visit to Delhi. One floor takes the visitor on a whirlwind tour of agriculture on the subcontinent from the Neolithic to the Green Revolution. Then you go down some stairs for exhibits on the current state of Indian agriculture. The displays and eye-catching, informative and well-arranged. My only complaint would be about the lack of explicit references to the importance of agrobiodiversity, its conservation and use, for sustainable agriculture, apart from a poster on the Green Revolution. But then the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources has its own museum.
Taking photographs was not allowed, so I can’t show you the wonderful diorama of a Mughal garden, and other great exhibits. I do hope the museum goes online sometime. Best I can do at the moment is this scan of the brochure that is handed out as you leave (click to enlarge).
Continue reading ““Barley-wheat” explained”
Nibbles: Traditional knowledge, Opium poppy, Fish, Bees, Earthworms, Wild horses, Camel, Fearl rabbits, Guinea savannah, Kava
- “In the face of climate change, keeping diverse, resilient ecosystems is one of the strongest tools for adaptation.”
- Getting high in Eden.
- Chinese ate freshwater fish 40,000 years ago.
- British MPs finish cleaning their moats, decide to save the honeybee.
- Worm power!
- LEISA 25:2 is out.
- Przewalski’s horse gets first ever reverse vasectomy.
- Early farmers used camel-drawn carts.
- Using Google Earth to map bunnies in Australia. And then kill them.
- Farming the savannah. What could go wrong?
- Stressed out? Try kava. With audio goodness.
Nibbles: Rice breeding, ICRISAT, Arkansas heirlooms, Rice domestication, Livestock products
- Oldest rice research facility in Western Hemisphere turns 100.
- ICRISAT DG plugs his genebank, says “India should start investing for the long-term sustainability of the farming sector particularly in dryland agriculture.”
- Seed-saving in Arkansas.
- The Archaeobotanist reviews rice domestication. And again.
- Nordics to discuss how to develop products based on local livestock breeds.
Rice breeding gets a boost … and needs it
The Hindu reports that the Tamil Nadu Rice Research Institute (TRRI) is now involved in the Cereal System Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), a project funded by USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and launched in January. One of the interesting, but arcane, aspects of The Hindu’s coverage is the use of the phrase “mega collaborative project” to describe CSISA. That phrase may resonate with people involved in the CGIAR’s latest effort to reinvent itself. The other is that “proven technologies will be delivered to the farmers and the pipeline technologies will be evaluated in Adaptive Research Trials for fine tuning and delivery”.
Will those proven technologies include the use of biodiversity other than as a source of interesting traits for the pipeline technologists?
We said originally that CSISA “deserves to be a success” but we’re still wondering how innovative the approach will be.
Rice is clearly going to need all the help it can get to continue to feed people in the next few decades. SciDev.net reports on a recent publication from scientists in Bangladesh predicting a 20% drop in yields to 2050 and a 50% drop to 2075. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the figures, but I can say that the world needs to wake up to the fact that changes are coming, that they are going to require flexibility and adaptability, and that it is not too late to start preparing.