- Dropping the poppy.
- Gardening on windowsills and along roadsides.
- Cooling camel milk. Via.
- Fingerprinting grapes.
- “The seed banks that are run by agribusiness corporations would be a costly pursuit for the government and farmers.” Where to start responding to this? Thanks, Jeff.
- Further evidence of food price crisis.
- “What does biodiversity mean to Syngenta?“
- Traditional healer goes online. Via.
- Videos from Global Plant Clinic.
Nibbles: Small kine, Cedar, Coffee, Cows (again), Niger, Citrus disease
- Mini-cows: Cheaper by the pound, but more expensive by the head.
- Lebanese icon imperilled.
- Birds protect coffee from coffee berry borer.
- Cows (m)aligned. Via.
- Jessica discovers millet and a grain bank (food, not seed).
- A new disease threatens citrus in Florida. Yay!
Nibbles: Horse milk, GMOs
- Marketing Indonesian horse milk as a nutraceutical. Good luck with that.
- Nick Cohen on Prince Charles on GMOs: “Like Marie Antoinette, he sees the poor as happiest when they have their place in a natural order, with royalty at its head.”
Nibbles: Qat, Tomato, Climate change squared, Documentation, Food diaspora, Mapping Africa, Gout, Chicken origins, HealthMap, Olive, Crop mixtures
- Catha edulis bad for Yemen economy. Having been waved a gun at by a qat-chewing Somali teenager, I can testify it’s bad for other things as well.
- Amy Goldman on the heirloom tomato.
- Biology Letters special feature on climate change and biodiversity.
- And more on climate change, this time its likely effect on livelihoods.
- All you ever wanted to know about plant genetic resources conservation in Germany.
- “Isn’t it crazy to think that everything we eat or use that comes from plants at one time grew completely wild?” Well, not so much.
- Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment. (Watch out, very large file.)
- Another reason not to drink sugary soft drinks: gout. Coconut water anyone?
- Pre-Columbian Chilean chickens could have come from anywhere, not just Polynesia.
- Mapping diseases.
- A 12th century olive genebank in Morocco.
- Traditional Ethiopian barley/wheat mixtures (hanfets) have some advantages over pure stands.
Nibbles: Food, Organic, Halophyte, Aromatic, Botanical garden, Coffee, Verroa mite, Pastoralists
- What’s good here? I love globalization.
- An organic oasis in Egypt.
- Today’s crop of the future: Salicornia.
- English lavender?
- Florida botanical garden collects plants threatened by climate change.
- “Los Delirios is a blend of Caturra, Typica, and Bourbon beans grown near Esteli, Nicaragua.”
- Fungus to help honey bees fight mites.
- “During our grandfathers’ time there were different types of grasses here, some for the cows and others for the goats and sheep. Now there’s no grass, the land has become barren.”