- Wow! Just wow. Big Picture Agriculture has launched an incredibly useful website.
- Chromosomes, crops and superdomestication, a slideshare presentation by Pat Heslop-Harrison.
- Cats, domesticated? Not as far as I’m concerned. Still, Ancient Chinese cats ate rats, leading to their domestication.
- Independent plant breeders, a conference just for you.
- Great ammunition for the lazy gardener.
- IBPES told to “tap the wisdom of indigenous peoples”.
- Kenyan policymakers told to consider the potato.
- Basque vineyards of a millennium ago.
- A new strain of UG99 wheat rust? But this time, the world is ready.
- Variable diets linked to variable emissions shock.
- scidev.net reports that ants protect cacao trees from fungal diseases. (Yes, I’m taking short cuts here.)
- Palaeolithic people preferred nutrition-rich places.
- And quinoa remains as confusing as ever.
- Tokyo’s local honey.
- Although agriculture barely features in a paean to urban biodiversity. It should.
- The holly and the coffee: The Botanist in the Kitchen does Yerba Maté
- Ready for the inevitable ennui of next Christmas, a taxonomy of conifers.
Brainfood: Chinese heritage sites, Chinese farmer coops, Seasonal foods, Agroforestry markets, Quinoa roadmap, Swedish pseudo-coffee, Barley phylogenetics, Switchgrass diversity, Italian maize composition, European forest vulnerability
- Conserving agricultural heritage systems through tourism: Exploration of two mountainous communities in China. Hopes of benefits are high. And will no doubt be cruelly dashed. What all this means for crop diversity is anyone’s guess.
- Farmer cooperatives in China: diverse pathways to sustainable rural development. Hopes of benefits are high. And will no doubt be cruelly dashed. What all this means for crop diversity is anyone’s guess.
- Seasonality and dietary requirements: will eating seasonal food contribute to health and environmental sustainability? Maybe, but other things are more important.
- Collective action to improve market access for smallholder producers of agroforestry products: key lessons learned with insights from Cameroon’s experience. It can work, and it helps if there is fun to be had.
- Quinoa biodiversity and sustainability for food security under climate change. A review. We’re going to have to move beyond Quinoa Real. Here comes the model.
- Swedish coffee (Astragalus boeticus L.), a neglected coffee substitute with a past and a potential future. It could be revived, and here’s how, but why would anyone want to?
- Phylogeny of ten species of the genus Hordeum L. as revealed by AFLP markers and seed storage protein electrophoresis. Breaks down into Old and New World species.
- Genetic Structure of Remnant Populations and Cultivars of Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) in the Context of Prairie Conservation and Restoration. Have to be careful using cultivars in the restoration of natural populations. Not because they are lower in diversity than natural populations, but because they are different.
- Carotenoids, Phenolic Compounds and Antioxidant Capacity of Five Local Italian Corn (Zea Mays L.). Kernels. Roccacontrada Rosso could be marketed as a functional food. But you lost me at that capital M.
- Vulnerability of dynamic genetic conservation units of forest trees in Europe to climate change. By 2100, about half of the species in the conservation units will be at the edge of or outside their climate niche.
Brainfood: Urban diets in Cameroon, Teak diversity in Brazil, Iranian wheat taxonomy, Mexican homegardens, Australian suburban landscapes, Food sovereignty, Sturgeon identification, Malaysian fruit, Amazon deforestation, Food processing & storage
- Wild Food, Prices, Diets and Development: Sustainability and Food Security in Urban Cameroon. Local wild foods are better, imported processed foods are cheaper.
- Genetic diversity of teak (Tectona grandis L.F.) from different provenances using microsatellite markers. In Brazil, that is. Lower than expected, therefore future breeding programmes should make more use of the most distinct provenances. But what about bringing some new ones in? Too damn difficult?
- Taxonomic identity of the Iranian diploid Triticum as evidenced by nrDNA ITS. Splitters were right.
- Plant management and biodiversity conservation in Nahuatl homegardens of the Tehuacan Valley, Mexico. Most diverse homegardens located near least diverse natural forest.
- Amenity enhancement and biodiversity conservation in Australian suburbia: moving towards maintaining indigenous plants on private residential land. It would need better laws.
- Food sovereignty: an alternative paradigm for poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation in Latin America. Economic poverty does not necessarily lead to biodiversity loss. But biodiversity loss does often lead to economic poverty.
- Species and hybrid identification of sturgeon caviar: a new molecular approach to detect illegal trade. SNPs can detect the low value, hybrid, aquacultured stuff with great accuracy. In other news, there are sturgeon hybrids.
- Malaysian Species of Plants with Edible Fruits or Seeds and Their Valuation. Over 500, of which about half wild.
- The impact of commodity price and conservation policy scenarios on deforestation and agricultural land use in a frontier area within the Amazon. Weak enforcement leads to more deforestation. And you need fancy maths to figure that out?
- Production and processing of foods as core aspects of nutrition-sensitive agriculture and sustainable diets. It’s no good producing diverse foods if you can’t store and process them.
Nibbles: Banana bionformatics, Banana problems, Dietary diversity indicator, SoD meet, MSSRF & millets, Intercropping tree crops, Ecosystem management, UNEP atlas, Pacific ABS, Seed theft
- Data geeks tuck into bananas.
- Will it help the Filipino smallholder, though?
- Dietary diversity suggested as an indicator of welfare at national level. Wow.
- Seeds of Discovery discovers it has made progress.
- Celebrating a potato breeder. We should do more of that.
- Beer-fueled conservation. Not what you’re thinking.
- Milling minor millets means more money.
- CIRAD breaks down intercropping rubber. And nutmeg?
- Better forest governance by the numbers. How about savannas
- Arab region gets an environmental atlas. Also in Google Earth.
- The Pacific learns about the ITPGRFA. Not for the first time…
- I guess these guys didn’t know about MTAs.
Nibbles: Homegardens, Ancient grains, Homeless hens, Data data data, New maize, ICRISAT ambassadors, Wine microbes, India, Soil Day
- Emma Cooper blogs her ethnobotanical MSc dissertation on British homegardeners and their cool crops.
- If she’d done her work in Sweden, she’d have written about Ragnar Pettersson and his “treasure of Ardre.”
- The downside of backyard farming: homeless hens.
- International e-Conference on Germplasm Data Interoperability: Genebank Database Hell gets an e-conference. What could possibly go wrong.
- Apparently there’s a new way to search for agricultural bibliografic (sic) data.
- CIMMYT gets its maize out there.
- ICRISAT is not one to hide its light under a bushel either.
- Aussies to survey their yeasts and bacteria to improve winemaking.
- The problems of India: “It takes a particular brand of incompetence and neglect for decades of stellar growth to have no apparent impact on India’s sky-high levels of under-nutrition.” I bet Dreze and Sen didn’t include a food bubble. Hey, but that can be exported.
- Oh and happy World Soil Day! Thanks to it, and Jim Croft, I now know Australia has a sort of soil genebank.