- ICRISAT DG agrees with Bioversity DG. Kinda. CGIAR DGs communicating via blog. Who’d have thunk it.
- Borlaug Global Rust Initiative gives its first Gene Stewardship Award to Nepali breeders. I wonder if they work with community genebanks at all. Or what they think about them. Or even if they know they are there.
- GCARD 2 is coming, socially networked up the wazoo. Be afraid.
- Authenticating natural health products via barcoding.
- FAO discussion on making agriculture work for nutrition.
- Nice photos of wild bees.
- Not sure if we already linked to the big report on why biotechnology is not delivering drought-resistant crops.
- Meet a Breeder. Conventional, natch.
- Who moved my artisanal cheese?
- Bird diversity on intensive farms like happy Tolstoyan familes: the same everywhere.
- What’s a poor cacao farmer to do? Obey the law and make a loss, or break it in the hope of breaking even?
- Kew does the crop wild relatives thing for Plantwise, and check out that picture!
- Nature discovers perreniation as salvation of African soils; can resilieficiency be far behind?
Nibbles: Red List, Açaí, Edible forest, Horticulture, Heirloom seed bank, Malnutrition journal, Tea breeding, Speak!
- Can cultivated species get their own Red List? Stefano Padulosi asks the tough questions.
- Açaí: could the wonder fruit also be wonderful for forests? CIFOR asks the tough questions.
- And more: You mean you can eat that?
- Horticulture has rock stars? My turn to ask the tough questions.
- Ok, so what US county is “…a hotbed of diversified, small-scale organic, natural processed food production”? Maybe not so tough.
- Will there be a follow-up to Lancet’s 2008 series on malnutrition? That’s an easy one.
- Luigi’s mother-in-law asks: Where can I get my hands on that drought-resistant tea?
- Got any other questions? World Wide Views on Biodiversity wants to hear from you, this Saturday. (Answers too, I suppose.)
Nibbles: IUCN conference tweep, ICARDA move, Adaptation stories, Branding and market chains, Tree farming
- Stefano Padulosi of Bioversity tweets from the IUCN conference in Korea. And here’s another way of following proceedings: The Twitter Hub.
- ICARDA forced to relocate.
- Results of survey of farmer adaptation strategies in East Africa. (And CIFOR has more examples.) So why do they need Climate Analogues then? I mean, given what we know about it and all… Oh come on, it’s not as bad as all that, look they’re even using it in Costa Rica. Nobody likes a whiny user. Ok, ok, fair enough.
- Branding not much use to farmers.
- Kenyan banker agrees with my mother-in-law on the usefulness of trees.
Nibbles: Heirloom conference, Saving plants, Aquaculture benefits, Ancient Egyptian botany, Coffee blogs, ITPGRFA, GIAH
- National Heirloom Exposition coming up. Any of our readers going? Oh come on, one of our readers must be going!
- Kew head honcho calls for a botanical New Deal.
- WorldFish head honcho calls for an aquacultural New Deal.
- A papyrus of recent botanical literature on ancient Egypt.
- Coffee blogs to follow. Oh gosh, am I blushing?
- Participants “gain more knowledge” at policy workshop. Of the ITPGRFA, that would be.
- A couple of Chinese agricultural systems gain recognition as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage.
What I read on my summer holidays
Yeah, summer is over and I’m back at work. Maybe you noticed I haven’t contributed much here in the past month or so. Or maybe you didn’t. Jeremy kept up a steady stream of agrobiodiversity nuggets pretty much all through August. But my lack of activity on the blog doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to keep up, as you would know if you followed us on Facebook, Twitter or Scoop.it. Anyway, for those that don’t, and would like to catch up on my summer reading, here is, in nibble form, what caught my eye during the past month or so:
- “The potato is a religious commodity in America.” Explaining the governance crisis in the US using the humble spud.
- Wait a minute though: “The sizzle seems to be gone from America’s long-term relationship with the potato.” Which apparently means it needs an extreme makeover, colour-wise. For which you’ll need a genebank.
- A tree’s leaves can be genetically different from its roots. Does that mean we have to re-think all molecular phylogenies?
- And speaking of a tree’s leaves, these ones are a thousand years old and give you a buzz.
- A toff with a passion for pigs. P.G. Wodehouse had something to say about this, didn’t he?
- Turns out WFP has a podcast. And ICIMOD has an RSS feed.
- A mathematician factchecks Michael Pollan.
- Pear with me please, while I tell you about another USDA fruit collection.
- 15 Africa-changing innovations include orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. As if they weren’t there before. Anyway, they were THE story for a couple of weeks in August.
- 12 food security innovations include increasing crop diversity. With orange-fleshed sweet potatoes?
- How to put that banana genome to some use.
- Getting the most out of your enumerators.
- IUCN’s Conservation Campus. Any ag? And on a similar topic, training materials in anthropology.
- Automating conservation assessment of plants. You’ll need provenance data from herbaria such as this one at CIP, of course. Oh, and speaking of CIP, they need a phylogeneticist.
- A market opportunity for the mother-in-law?
- Measuring the health of the oceans. Hey, but it’s not all bad for fish.
- Ten species which rely on ex situ conservation. And why that number will go up. How to pay for it all, though?
- Book on the recent history of agricultural research reviewed. I wonder if they looked at the private sector. Because it seems there may be a case to answer.
- Another big grant for taxonomic databases. Ah but this is all going to be community-driven.
- Looks like this Australian genebank could have done with a decent database, community-driven or not.