- Grazing is good for grassland.
- Saving British food. And that of Ghana too, why not?
- Amaranth the next superfood? Maybe, but I vote we ban that silly term.
- The case for fortification: diverse diets are just too hard.
- And the latest fruit that’s in trouble is…the avocado.
- Wanna “[s]pend your summer in lovely Kew Gardens interacting with the public and opening people’s eyes and noses to the delightful world of spices”?
- Photographing the soul of coffee.
- Atlas of Living Australia adds nifty phylogenetic thingie.
- World Bank says “agriculture has a unique and critical role in improving nutritional status” so it must be true.
- Protecting forests from the air.
Nibbles: Ipomoea CWR, Toe cheese, Millets revolution, World diets, Brassica diversification, Diversity & productivity, Gossypium genome, MsDonalds, NNL & NPI
- Where should we collect sweet potato wild relatives?
- Cheese made from toe bacteria. Because we can.
- The sainted M.S. Swaminathan on millets.
- FAO brings together dietary guidelines from around the world.
- An infographic on kale origins.
- Diversity down, productivity down. At least in Alaska.
- Cotton’s got a genome.
- McDonalds commits to ending deforestation in its supply chain.
- IUCN report says commercial agriculture and forestry could could actually be good for biodiversity. Hope McDonalds read it.
Nibbles: Svalbard double, AgAtlas upgrade, Ornamental database, Wild apples, Genetic garden, Sandalwood trade, Amazon dams, Body bacteria, ICRISAT blog, African greens, Aquatic camel, Mujer empowerment
More of a proper catch-up Nibbles later, but these should hold you for a while.
- Le Figaro goes to Svalbard.
- But Wired goes into much more depth on the tragic situation in Syria.
- Many AgAtlas pages now include interactive mapping and data download, eg AEZ. About time :)
- Looking for information on varieties of ornamental plants? Look no further.
- Diversity in wild European apples: past, present and future.
- Genetic garden opens in Bangalore.
- The perils of sandalwood smuggling.
- Dam the Amazon, full speed ahead! What will happen to all that human body bacteria diversity?
- ICRISAT’s new DG has a blog. Looking forward to his first foray into the genebank.
- Lots of stuff on African traditional veggies in AVRDS’s latest newsletter.
- The swimming camels of Gujarat get protection. I’d pay money to see them, I really would.
- Patagonian women farmers are doing it for themselves, at last.
Nibbles: Local earthworm, Public-private, Cassava double, Food prices, Amazonian rubber, Mongolian ag, Pacific roots, Potato CWR, Ugandan plantain, Galician brassicas, Contesting agronomy, Silver bullet
- Lamb ham: an easter tradition we can all get behind.
- Indian researchers market a new earthworm. Not to bring you down or anything.
- PPP are the new black. It says here.
- Cassava gets Big Data treatment. That’s kinda biotechnology too. But then you have to commercialize the stuff, right?
- “Food price shocks are both a determinant and effect of conflict.”
- Recognizing the “rubber soldiers”.
- Chinese experts tell Mongolians how to be more resilient to climate change. I hope it works out for them.
- New potato and sweet potato varieties for the Pacific come to CePaCT.
- Any of those potato varieties benefit from wild relatives?
- New plantain variety for Uganda.
- Galician genebank gets old brassicas. National genebank unavailable for comment. Actually, national genebank unavailable.
- “We can see the blinkered promotion and systematic ‘bigging-up’ of individual agricultural technologies, and their real or imagined impacts, as a direct result of the uncritical acceptance of the language of ‘impact at scale’.”
- Biotechnologist says we need biotechnology to feed world. QED.
Nibbles: Old date, Cassava genomic selection, Citizen science double, Cover crops, Quinoa boom, Sorghum boom, Teff boom, Gluten, Malnutrition roundup, African veggies, Farmer2farmer, Double chocolate
- That 2000-year old date palm seed is all grown up.
- And since we’re talking ancient stuff: ornithology in the service of egyptology.
- Citizen scientists track phenology.
- Citizen scientists find new species.
- Let’s hear it for cover crops.
- Turns out it’s ok for hipsters to eat quinoa.
- Sorghum takes over the Great Plains. (Well, not really.) And not only… Who needs quinoa.
- Especially when you have teff.
- And while we’re on gluten: need to make up for that off-colour quip in the last Nibbles.
- Malnutrition. Mapped. Including that much-discussed Missing Middle? Hang on, wait, here’s another nutrition mapping thing.
- African leafy greens in Benin get a video. Map that!
- Farmers make good extensionists.
- Chocolate workshops at Kew.
- Caribbean chocolate to get a make-over. Somebody telling Kew?