- What is sustainable intensification? Views from experts. Ambiguous term which may not signify a departure from current practice anyway. Ecological intensification instead?
- Intellectual Property Rights Access to Genetic Resources and Indian Shrimp Aquaculture: Evolving Policy Responses to Globalization. I kid you not.
- Patterns of Domestication in the Ethiopian Oil-seed Crop Noug (Guizotia abyssinica). Weirdness, for a domesticated crop, not due to its wild relative messing things up. What it is due to is a “mystery.” Thanks, authors.
- Bio-Banking on Neglected and Underutilized Plant Genetic Resources of Nigeria: Potential for Nutrient and Food Security. Never even heard of some of these.
- Comparison of different Ocimum basilicum L. gene bank accessions analyzed by GC–MS and sensory profile. Among 12 cultivars in the Hungarian genebank, there are 5 distinct smell profiles. That actually seems quite a lot.
- The role of cultural ecosystem services in landscape management and planning. Sometimes, they can hold you back.
- Carbon farming via assisted natural regeneration as a cost-effective mechanism for restoring biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. It can be a viable use of land in parts of Queensland, depending on the price of C.
- Ethnobotany of a threatened medicinal plant “Indravan” (Cucumis callosus) from central India. Cucumber wild relatives also medicinal.
Nibbles: Old pretzel, Wine podcast, Nordic podcast, Tea history, Pacific pests app, Eating bugs, Chicken history, African superfoods, Gender, Access to seeds, Sorghum beer, Making mead, Cumin, Bolivian school meals, MLN, Hidden hunger conference, CIP & IK, Potato Park, CIP’s Sawyer, Saving wheat, Resettlement, Sustainable cacao, Deforestation map, Language map
Again, sorry for slow blogging last week. Work, you know. Here we play catch-up.
- While we were away, we reached 6000 Twitter followers! Thanks, everyone!
- And Germans found a 250-year-old pretzel. Wait, you can get those at Kamps every day though. (Bonn inside joke.)
- Oh, and Jeremy talked to a wine expert about how to become a wine expert.
- But he has competition from the Nordic Food Lab now. What are you waiting for, subscribe to both!
- Since we’re on podcasts, Laszlo Montgomery’s monumental ten-part blockbuster on the history of tea in China recently came to a close.
- Talking of iTunes, ver. 2 of the Pacific Pest and Pathogens app is out.
- Don’t want to get into the whole eating insects thing? Feed them to your chickens instead.
- There’s even an infographic about that now.
- But what will it do to the poor old chicken?
- Cooking up some African superfoods. No insects (or chickens) were harmed in the making of this article.
- Yeah but who will be doing the cooking?
- And where to get the seeds? Maybe African Seed Access Index will help, though I somehow doubt it. At least for baobab.
- Oh well, there’s always beer I guess. (Though even that you can’t take for granted these days.)
- Or mead, at a pinch.
- I bet the Sumerians put a pinch of cumin in their beer. And mead.
- What about Latin America superfoods, though? Bolivians put them in their school meals, that’s what.
- Maize was a Latin American superfood once. Having trouble in Africa now, though.
- Wait, what, there was a 2nd International Congress on Hidden Hunger at the University of Hohenheim last week? And all I got was this t-shirt? Any superfoods on the menu there, I wonder?
- CIP on how it deals with traditional knowledge.
- For example at the Potato Park. Where I’ll be next week, incidentally. Stay tuned… But again, I rather fear that blogging will be on the light side next week.
- CIP has come a long way since its first DG, Dr Richard L. Sawyer, who sadly just passed away.
- Modelling the effects of climate change on wheat. Again. Can never have enough data. Anyway, wild relatives the answer?
- Mongolian nomads settle down. And not in a good way.
- There’s more to sustainable cacao than productivity. Fortunately, some people are on that. Meanwhile, at the other end of the poverty spectrum…
- Don’t think I’ve ever seen a nerdy interactive map like Global Forest Watch go mainstream. Hope for us all. Mash it up with this next?
Brainfood: Identifying accessions, Evaluating yeasts, Using CWR, Wild grapes, Bushmeat and nutrition, Rice evaluation, Tomato characterization, Sugarcane CWR, Nordic livestock, Conservation optimization, Moringa development, Albanian olives
- High-throughput genotyping for species identification and diversity assessment in germplasm collections.. 9% of random Brassicaceae samples from Australian Grains Genebank misidentified to species, with some interspecific hybrids.
- Methodology for enabling high-throughput simultaneous saccharification and fermentation screening of yeast using solid biomass as a substrate. Everything is now, now, now these days.
- Utilization of wild relatives of wheat, barley, maize and oat in developing abiotic and biotic stress tolerant new varieties. Useful summary table at the end.
- Patterns of SNP distribution provide a molecular basis for high genetic diversity and genetic differentiation in Vitis species. Different grape species are really different.
- Disentangling the relative effects of bushmeat availability on human nutrition in central Africa. Both rational use of some wild mammals for nutrition, and conservation of more vulnerable species, are possible, though in different places.
- Blast Resistant Genes Distribution and Resistance Reaction to Blast in Korean Landraces of Rice (Oryza sativa L.). Conventional evaluation of landraces is useless; you really need to look at the genes.
- Characterization of a collection of local varieties of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) using conventional descriptors and the high-throughput phenomics tool Tomato Analyzer. Brave new world.
- Phylogenetic analysis of Saccharum s.l. (Poaceae; Andropogoneae), with emphasis on the circumscription of the South American species. Allopolyploid, with 2 species belonging in a different genus.
- Utilization of farm animal genetic resources in a changing agro-ecological environment in the Nordic countries. Need to phenotype and genotype everything. Now where have I heard that before?
- Multi-objective optimization for plant germplasm collection conservation of genetic resources based on molecular variability. Lots of data plus fancy maths can tell you which individuals you should add to an ex situ collection to maximize conserved diversity.
- Actual and Potential Applications of Moringa stenopetala, Underutilized Indigenous Vegetable of Southern Ethiopia: A Review. Potential as a source of drugs, but you need to learn to grow it.
- Olive in the story and art in Albania. There are old olive trees around castles.
Nibbles: Year of the Goat, Nutritional guidelines, Healthy diets, IK & conservation, Healthy orchards, Indian endemics trouble, CWR garden, NGS & food security, 3000 rice genomes at work, C4 rice, It’s economics stupid, US animal products map, Milk production history, Old Chinese cheese, Old Arabian seashells by the seashore, Gordon Bleu insects, African agriculture visions, Agroecology conference report, Smallholder diversity, Seed systems project, Supermarket farms, Toronto beer, Herbs factsheets, Ecosystems map, Contested Agronomy
Sorry about no blogging last week. Was watching sausages being made. Here’s a quick roundup of most of the stuff I would have Nibbled.
- But first of all, Happy Year of the Ram, everyone. No, wait…
- Brazil has the best nutritional guidelines.
- But Chad the best diet. Both are kinda ironic.
- Well, what can governments do about supporting healthy food preferences anyway?
- Folk knowledge vital to conservation.
- Well I never, say the East Timorese.
- Farming in a national park can be a win-win.
- Maybe even a win-win-win, if cider apples are involved.
- India’s endemic plants could be in trouble. Many crop wild relatives among them?
- Maybe they should do what the Royal Horticultural Society will be doing at the Malvern Spring Festival and make a garden with crop wild relatives. But then it won’t be the world’s first.
- Next generation genomics is this generation’s jetpack.
- No, wait, here’s that jetpack you’ve been expecting for so long… Well, more the first concept of the assembly instructions, really.
- We’ll get that jetpack before C4 rice, I expect. But we will get both.
- But of course it’s not all about production anyway.
- Squid is Rhode Island’s most lucrative animal product. Otherwise it’s mainly milk, in that part of the US.
- Maybe cheese was the Taklamakan’s. Three thousand years ago. And sea molluscs Saudi Arabia‘s. Five thousand years ago.
- When and where will insects be.
- “Large-scale investment in African agriculture and agribusiness, whether foreign, domestic, private, government-backed, or a combination of these, could pay a vital role in providing urgently needed financing, technology and markets, thereby assisting to ensure food security, contributing to poverty reduction and propelling agriculture-driven growth, with significant implications for achieving more inclusive growth.” Is that really all one sentence?
- Or maybe small-scale investment?
- How much investment in agroecology will there be, I wonder. Even after this report from last year’s FAO conference.
- Oh good, 75% of crop diversity still on small farms. Would that be 75% of the 25% remaining from the last century?
- What effect will the Integrated Seed Sector Development Project Africa have on that 75%, I wonder.
- The farm as a supermarket. Almost makes you believe in that 75%.
- The beery history of Toronto. Yes, Toronto.
- The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) has nutritional fact sheets on herbs.
- A great new global ecosystem map has the GIS nerds all excited.
- “Contested Agronomy 2016 is a conference about the battlefields in agricultural research, past and present.” Oh to have the live-tweeting gig. Hell, I’d do it for free. Wait, don’t I already do it for free? Hasn’t this whole Nibbles been about contestation in agricultural development?
And on that note, that’s all folks. Because this was such a pain to put together after a week’s hiatus, I’m going to leave it on the front page for a day or two before sending it to the Siberia of the sidebar. Oh and BTW, people. We want to reach 6,000 followers on Twitter, preferably before that jetpack arrives, so follow us already, and tell your hipster friends.
Wait, too needy?
Nibbles: Old breweries, Old grape seeds, New beer, Sheep breeds, Indian rice landraces, GM rice in China, Barley breeding, Botanical tipple, Mata Atlantica conservation, Quinoa
- There are some really old breweries out there.
- And some really old grape seeds in Sardinia.
- The beauty of hops. New and old.
- Some very photogenic old sheep breeds in the Lake District.
- Someone has discovered some old salt-tolerant rice landraces. Also medicinal and aromatic rices. Well I never.
- Meanwhile, at the other end of the rainbow, the Chinese dip a toe into gourmet GM rice.
- Brit boffins breed flood-proof barley.
- Botanical gin. Two of my favourite things, combined.
- Saving the Pau Brasil is, well, complicated. But what else was it going to be?
- Yet another roundup of the pros and cons of quinoa.