- Straws in the wind or portent of change? Why Farmers Are Embracing Social Media: the #AgChat Story
- Straws in the wind or portent of change? AGree (geddit?) Transforming Food and Ag Policy. See also Marion Nestle’s commentary and comments therein.
- More on the medicinal trees genebank in Nairobi.
- And just look at the new website of the International Potato Center genebank. Part of a complete makeover.
Nibbles: Fair mangoes, Rice domestication, Saline collections, Spice collections, Aquaculture, Salmon
- Fair trade Haitian mangoes hit the shelves.
- Molecular boffins use nifty new toys to re-write rice history. Until the next time.
- The genebank of the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai has found material suitable for, ahem, saline agriculture.
- The genebank of the Indian Institute of Spices Research in Calicut has a large collection of, ahem, spices.
- The downside of tilapia.
- And, speaking of fish, it’s not all bad news.
MAP rap
I’m not sure if we’ve already flagged the International Symposium on Medicinal and Aromatic Plants, planned for August 16 through 19 in Flores, Peten, Guatemala. As ever, if you’re going, we’d love to hear from you, during the event or afterwards, either way works for us.
Agricultural biodiversity in the Linear B tablets
It was a great thrill during a recent visit to Athens to check out selected Linear B tablets on display at the National Archaeological Museum. I hadn’t seen these things outside books since I was about 12 I think. It was an even greater thrill to realize — or remember — that some deal with agrobiodiversity. Here’s one (Ge 610) that “records quantities of raw materials for perfume manufacture.” It comes from the House of the Sphinxes at Mycenae, which may have belonged to a herbalist.
Unfortunately, I was not able to find any further information online about Ge 610, but I had better luck with Ge 603, one of a set “recording aromatic herbs (cumin, coriander, fennel, sesame, saffron) associated with male (workers) names).”
You can read all about that one in Writing Without Letters:
And it also gets a footnote in another book. Oh what fun one could have with this!
Refocus Afghanistan’s agriculture
We’ve occasionally, and perhaps too timidly, mentioned the futility of attempts to eradicate Papaver somniferum in Afghanistan. The crop is ideally suited to the terrain, and the product lucrative and in short supply globally. Also, illegal, at least in Afghanistan. But not in France, India or Australia. Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, a group blog, Charli Carpenter makes a well-linked and well-argued case for reframing Afghanistan’s poppy problem (or, perhaps more accurately, the West’s problem with Afghanistan’s poppies) as an opportunity to improve global public health. One thing she doesn’t mention — and why would she? — is that poppies would probably be a lot more sustainable than most of the alternatives, needing less water and less land than, say, wheat or vegetables, and almost certainly displacing less local agricultural biodiversity.
h/t Sam Zeitlin