Medicinal plants

Nibbles: Rio, Livestock & crops, Rice restored, Asparagus trials, Pigeonpea DNA, Tomato taste, Liquorice, Palm pest

The UK is fully on board for Rio+20 to “prioritize sustainable agriculture”.
Maybe they saw ILRI’s number on mixed crops and livestock?
The Japanese say that restoring the surrounding ecosystem is what restored rice production after last year’s tsunami. So they will support the UK?
Amateur trials genebank’s asparagus varieties. I got a great bean that way.
AoBblog catches up with the pigeonpea priority problem.
“‘We now know exactly what we need to do to fix the broken tomato,’ said Harry Klee of the University of Florida.” You couldn’t make this science knows how stuff up.
A new use for liquorice: treating type 2 diabetes.
Something is eating the palms of Antigua, including the coconut palms. I’m no expert, but the symptoms look a lot like the work of the red palm weevil, our Roman palm disaster.

The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?

Latest Plant Press has interesting stuff on botanical data of various forms. Always worth a skim.
CSA pamphlet on the importance of crop wild relatives. Why does this feel like a bandwagon? And how long to the backlash?
And talking of bandwagons, here’s the latest from the one on citizen botany. Does indigenous tree knowledge count as citizen science? How about indigenous weed knowledge?
And how about using your pet pig to reinvigorate a breed?
Interesting take on fruit variety names. Can we crowdsource an answer?
Everything about the opening of that new Mexican mega-genebank. Including the speeches. Nice-looking building, I must say. And from IRRI an example of a genebank from the other end of the scale in the Philippines. And similar, but different, from ~~Canada~~ Colorado.
Biodiversity bigshots beg for naming blitz. Better hurry. And don’t forget the soil.
Sargasso Sea coming ashore in Ghana is bad news for fisherfolk. Can they not eat it? Is it bad to ask that?
How to find your way around weather data.
Swedes to provide IPR training for PGR types.
Island nations from opposite sides of the world brought together by agrobiodiversity. Full disclosure: I’ve worked with both regional PGR networks and want to again.
Brits who worked on spuds.
And Wontoks who worked on taro.
Privatizing conservation.

I’ve already pre-ordered Darwinian Agriculture, and now I can get a head start by downloading Chapter 1 for free.
Oxfam gives Vietnamese new watermelon seeds to combat climate change. But what kind of seeds?
Relive yesterday’s webinar on Managing pests and disease under climate change: What do we need to learn?
Speaking of which, a reminder of CABI’s New Pest & Disease Records.
New use for lime juice: disinfecting drinking water.
Fermentation Nation feat. my favorite microorganisms.
Mexico toys with new plant variety protection law, NGOs worried.
Finally, overworked person updates agrobiodiversity group on Mendeley.

On farm conservation; Bioversity is really good at it. (And I sometimes make a linking mistake; mea maxima culpa.)
Economics of plant genetic resource management for adaptation to climate change. What’s the bottom line? No idea.
Something else Bioversity is really good at: newsletters.
Using GIS to help communities map vegetable production and marketing in Bangkok. I like the acronym: V-GIS.
The variety of non-chile peppers.
Older fruits better. Quentin Crisp unavailable for comment.