- Learn about CIAT’s reseach via the posters they put on slideshare. Couple on their beans and cassava genebank.
- Trying to speed up apple breeding.
- Biodiversity interventions find it difficult to fight poverty. How about agrobiodiversity interventions?
- More bad news: protected areas don’t work anyway. At least for trees in Burkina Faso.
- Boffins trying to spot contraband honey. There’s contraband honey?
- Gin drinkers told to start worrying.
- Forest of Belfast project to wind up, but not before finding really old oak.
Recognizing World Malaria Day
As a victim, I am particularly happy to recognize World Malaria Day and hail the Cinchona tree, source of quinine. Artemisia is the new Chinchona, of course. I dread to think how many of the kids in this picture I took in the Solomons, where I picked up the disease, will get malaria, or have already had it. Thanks, Kew.
Nibbles: Heirloom store, Leaf miners, Mongolian drought, GPS, Coca, Ag origins, Aquaculture, Lice, Bud break in US, IFAD livestock, biofuels, Pig history
- “Housed in the towering old 1926 Sonoma County Bank, it’s hard to miss the Seed Bank.” And who would want to anyway.
- Of apples, leaf miners and bacteria. Great story.
- Best synthesis and analysis of the Mongolian dzud story so far.
- Visualize your GPS data! Not agrobiodiversity, I know, but I don’t have another blog.
- Coca myths debunked. Sniff sniff.
- “Crop domestication and the first plant breeders” book charpter online.
- Rebranding Asian carp. Hard row to hoe. Thanks, Don.
- 190,000 year old clothes had lice. 190,000 year old humans had clothes?
- More citizen science stuff, this one on effect of climate change on plant phenology in the US.
- IFAD publishes bunch of livestock-related papers. ILRI, are you listening?
- “It’s 36 percent more efficient to grow grain for food than for fuel.” Good to have a number.
- Boffins do their aDNA thing on Chinese pigs, find continuity, multiple domestication, sweet and sour sauce recipe.
- Soil Association begs to differ on that whole
UKworld-needs-to-double-food-production thing.
Nibbles: Asses, Mapping pathogens, Oysters, Tea, Turkish biodiversity hotspot, Dolmades and sage, Yams festival, Pollen video, Agriculture and mitigation, Rarity, School feeding, Sheep
- Jeremy probes into wild asses at Vaviblog.
- Mapping the evolution of pathogens. And in kinda related news…
- The European oyster needs diversity. Well, natch.
- The tree forests of Yunnan, and, concidentally, the story of how the secret of their product got out.
- The Kaçkar Mountains at Yusufeli, northeast Turkey are in trouble. Any crop wild relatives there, among the bears and other charismatic megafauna?
- Speaking of Turkey, here’s how to make one of its delicacies. But hey, if you don’t have vine leaves, you can use this.
- Having fun with yams.
- Drori does pollen.
- FAO’s Mitigation of Climate Change in Agriculture (MICCA) Project. Any agrobiodiversity-related stuff? Need to explore…
- “…conserving species may only require specific activities, such as collect and distributing seeds.”
- African school feeding programme uses “local” products. What would Paarlberg say? You can find out here, if you have 90 minutes to spare.
- British boffins breed self-shearing sheep. No, really.
Nibbles: Peanut butter, Haiti relief, Afghan weed, VetMed
- There are no origins in food.
- Haitians get seeds. But of what kind(s)? Why not give some of them Carossier palm seeds to plant?
- Afghans are incredible cannabis farmers.
- Animals need traditional remedies too.