- Mexicans can’t afford avocados.
- “Vostok — delo tonkoe, Petrukha!“
- New blog on crop wild relatives in the US, courtesy of our friend Colin.
- Royal villa has nice garden shock.
- “Three-quarters of date palm trees in Iraq right now … are of just one variety.”
Nibbles: Biodiversity fund, Mexican maize landraces, Przewalski’s horse
- Dutch biodiversity fund to pay dividend in cheese. Gouda, presumably.
- Landraces save farmers from climate change, yada yada.
- Horse wild relative wilder than originally thought.
Punjabis saving iconic Italian cheese
It was almost exactly 345 years ago that Samuel Pepys famously dug a hole in his garden in order to save his parmesan cheese from the Great Fire of London:
…and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.
I like to think the great diarist would have been fascinated to know both that production of that caseinic wonder continues to this day around Parma (with the no doubt invaluable protection of the European Union), and that it is currently largely in the hands of Sikh immigrants:
In the middle of the Po Valley, where the xenophobic Northern League has its core voters, there is now a symbol that coexistence between different cultures and religions can work very well. In Pessina Cremonese, between Mantua and Cremona, the largest Sikh temple in Europe was recently inaugurated. And all agree: without this Indian folk and religious community this area would be much poorer, and typical Italian products such as Parmesan cheese would perhaps be no more.
Nibbles: Rice biofortification, Wild walnuts, Himalayan agriculture, Eating invasives, Gissen on wine, Medicinal fungus, Soil initiative, Ag development in S Sudan, AVRDC and WorldFish, Value chains
- Boffins to rice: Pump it Up!
- Saving the nuts of Central Asia.
- Nepali women abandon hybrids for landraces and community seedbanks. Weird thing is that it’s a WWF project. But where are the extensionists? If only they had listened in Bhutan. Ok that packed a lot of links in there.
- Never saw an invasive I didn’t like.
- Architectural theorist tackles wine. Not many people hurt.
- Turns out 57 insect species can play host to that famous medicinal fungus that led to war between Tibetan communities a couple of years back. Which helps how?
- An envelope is opened at FAO.
- Seeds come to South Sudan. One hopes they are of the right kinds. And that somebody is collecting what was there before. Maybe someone should call WWF.
- You want vegetables with your fish?
- Crops for the Future says not all middlemen bad.
Home of the potato
Home of the potato, a set by PRI’s The World on Flickr.
Today’s PRI piece on how an old potato is helping Andean farmers cope with climate change also points to some fun spud photos (see above) which are in fact all of potatoes, unlike in the recent NatGeo disaster. And to a great video of CIP Director General Pamela Anderson eating chips (crisps), which she really shouldn’t do because they’re not very healthy (the chips, not the potatoes), but what the hell.