Microbes

October 7, 2008October 7, 2008

Nibbles: Cacao, Pamphlets, Breadfruit, Goats, Milk, Economic drivers, Truffles

Cacao comes inÂ 10 “flavours”, not just 3.
PDFs of pamphlets on different aspects of agricultural biodiversity from FAO.
Diane Ragone interviewed on breadfruit.
Something for the weekend, Mr Goat?
Got yak milk?
High livestock prices mean lots of livestock on the land means low biodiversity on farmland. Here comes the science.
NatGeo video on the trouble with truffles.

September 30, 2008September 30, 2008

Nibbles: Fungi, Early warming, Food banks, High concept, Russia, Wine, Apples, China, Sustainable ag

Vesicular arbuscular mychorriza help improve fallows.
Google.org has a Predict and Prevent Initiative to catch outbreaks of human diseases before they happen. Would be nice to have something similar for threats of erosion of agrobiodiversity.
Niger’s soudure food banks: could they act as village-level genebanks?
You might call it meta-farmingâ€”the quasi-philosophical approach to raising crops and livestock that proceeds not from necessity or commercial aims but a concept.
Farming in Russia: a slide show with narration.
Army worm wine. WTF? Via. (They’re caterpillars.)
A Kazak apple a day keeps the blue mold away.
Neolithic China: not just rice.
The oldest continuous cotton experiment in the world.

September 10, 2008September 11, 2008

Nibbles: Favas, Olives, Insects, Beer, Hallucinogen

UK breeders scour ICARDA’s fava beans for better genes. What next? Chianti?
Olive cultivation then and now. An archaeologist speaks.
Entomophagy.
Lager yeast origins.
Salvia divinorum: underutilized no longer.

August 21, 2008November 28, 2017

Nibbles: Honey, Records, Fowl, Fungi

GIS used to manage production and marketing of honey.
Silly season story number 1 and number 2.
Avian flu threatens Turkey’s HacÄ±kadÄ±n chickens.
Lybia has truffles? From the new NWFP-Newsletter((FAO’s link is broken.)).

August 6, 2008August 7, 2008

Nibbles: Human migrations, Fungi, Madagascar, Green Revolution

“Nilotic-language speakers … first brought herds of animals to southern Africa before the Bantu migration” about 2000 years ago.
British truffles go berserk. And more.
An interview with the guy who’s been mapping hundreds of Malagasy species.
Not sure if I already drew your attention to the New Agriculturist’s Focus feature on A Green Revolution for Africa.

1. What has agrobiodiversity ever done for us? Kent Nnadozie of the Plant Treaty lays it out.
2. Michael Frei of the HealthyDiets4Africa project doesn’t need it laid out.
3. Neither do the people who awarded a prize to Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
4. What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
5. Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
6. Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
7. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
8. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
9. Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
10. And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
11. And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
12. Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
13. You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
14. I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
15. Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.
16. No, not using ancient DNA, but actually…
Published on April 4, 2025