- A genomic variation map provides insights into the genetic basis of cucumber domestication and diversity. Four geographic groups, bottleneck not too bad. Opportunity for breeding for better nutritional value. But I suspect that’s a low bar.
- Dietary mineral supplies in Africa. Zn seems to be the lowest hanging fruit, as it were. I wonder if above’s super-cucumbers would help.
- Mechanisms for flowering plants to benefit arthropod natural enemies of insect pests: Prospects for enhanced use in agriculture. If you chose the right plants to plant, you can boost biological control of insect pests on farms.
- Agricultural expansion and its impacts on tropical nature. Roads will lead to increased conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Sustainable intensification is the answer.
- From Food Insufficiency towards Trade Dependency: A Historical Analysis of Global Food Availability. If most of us have more food now, it’s because of trade.
- Technical challenges in evaluating southern China’s forage germplasm resources. Nothing they can’t handle, clearly.
- Sustaining Frafra potato (Solenostemon rotundifolius Poir.) in the food chain; current opportunities in Ghana. Better varieties and processing. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, in every single paper on neglected crops.
- Rayada specialty: the forgotten resource of elite features of rice. It’s a weird variant of deepwater rice from Bangladesh with possible enhanced stress tolerance due to longer root system.
- Persea schiedeana: A High Oil “Cinderella Species” Fruit with Potential for Tropical Agroforestry Systems. Superior genotypes of this neglected avocado relative identified in fairs in Mexican region, and targeted for vegetative propagation and participatory breeding.
- Quality characteristics of European avena genetic resources collections. The modern varieties are better, but that doesn’t mean the old ones are useless.
- Nutrient Intake, Morbidity and Nutritional Status of Preschool Children are Influenced by Agricultural and Dietary Diversity in Western Kenya. Low food variety is associated with stunting. Kinda sorta.
Nibbles: Quinoa, Millet, Prize, Agroforestry, Herdwick sheep, Plant breeding, Potato breeding book, Taro varieties, Hot chocolate, Spices
- Oh no! Super-writer Bittman condemns yet more Bolivian farmers to destitution with yummy quinoa recipes.
- Can Geoff Tansey help the poor millet farmers of the Deccan Plateau to avoid that fate?
- Maybe he should enter that millet “initative” for The Equator Prize.
- We’re deafened by the buzz in advance of the World Congress on Agroforestry.
- For example, better nutrition associated with trees in urban environments and rural tree cover.
- Today’s genome of passing interest: Herdwick sheep. They’re primitive, y’know.
- Realfood.org – a name to strike apparently undeserved fear into the hearts of the cynical – offers an encomium to conventional modern plant breeding.
- Which is apparently a lost art, at least as regards potatoes.
- But not taro, if latest news from Pacific is to be believed. Ignore the title, BTW.
- How they made hot chocolate in the olden days, the really olden days.
- Another stunner from the Botanist in the Kitchen: Spices and phylogeny.
Nibbles: Not just yield, Nutrition infographic, Kenya tea, Tree domestication, Golden Rice talk, iRNA, Urban ag, Indian homegardens, Chocolate pix
- Ann Tutwiler, DG of Bioversity, on why we have to solve a quadratic equation of food security now. But is it 7,000 edible plant species, or 12,000? h/t Nancy Castaldo
- Go to page 9 for a cool infographic on nutrition which kinda illustrates that. But really, what a palaver to find it. Which actually I did via Twitter.
- Quadratic? More like non-linear para-differential equations. Or one of those weird things out of chaos theory.
- You can bet ICRAF think one solution to that equation involves the domestication of fruit trees.
- Is Golden Rice another solution? There’s a debate later tonight that might help you decide.
- And while we’re dealing with gene jockeys, apparently RNAi is the Next Big Thing.
- Community, ecosystems, poverty reduction; urban agriculture can do it all. And Dyno Keating, DG of AVRDC, would probably agree.
- And here’s a big PDF from the Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems to show you exactly how. Who needs equations?
- Fed up with maths? Cacao, bean to bar, in photos.
Nibbles: Water buffalo, Beans, Rhizowen, Fisheries, Frankincence, Gender and gender, US CWR, Cropland, Forests and food security
- Today’s genome of passing interest, the water buffalo, less than two years after it was promised.
- Saluting the true amateurs, on bean and tuberous diversity.
- Unconsidered benefits of capture fisheries — except for the captured fish, I suppose.
- Eleven months early, AoBblog links to a new paper on how to best to tap frankincense.
- Not to be outdone, Modern Farmer relates how maple syrup could be industrialised as a row crop. H/t Metafilter.
- An e-learning course on Gender in Agriculture.
- Which is unlikely to please Ed Carr, author of Gender and adaptation: Time to do it differently.
- US inventories its crop wild relatives.
- Demand for cropland will increase.
- Which is bad for forests, which are good for food security, but not as much as they could be.
Brainfood: Domestication syndrome, Açaí cultivation, FIGS galore, Bean FIGS, Polish wheat, Rice groups, Chickpea QTLs, Cuban ag history, Agroforestry domestication, Conservation markets
- Plant domestication versus crop evolution: a conceptual framework for cereals and grain legumes. Only traits showing clear dimorphism between wild and cultivated taxa are really part of Domestication Syndrome. If there’s a continuum, it happened afterwards.
- Reconfiguring Agrobiodiversity in the Amazon Estuary: Market Integration, the Açaí Trade and Smallholders’ Management Practices in Amapá, Brazil. Açaí driving out other crops. Sometimes those underutilized crops should stay that way? Maybe not, as at the same time, homegardens are diversifying.
- Mining germplasm banks for photosynthetic improvement — wheat, rice, potato, legumes and maize. You need maps.
- Do faba bean (Vicia faba L.) accessions from environments with contrasting seasonal moisture availabilities differ in stomatal characteristics and related traits? Yes. Those maps again.
- Can Polish wheat (Triticum polonicum L.) be an interesting gene source for breeding wheat cultivars with increased resistance to Fusarium head blight? What do you think?
- Genetic diversity and classification of Oryza sativa with emphasis on Chinese rice germplasm. Six major groups, not five. We shall see.
- Genetic dissection of drought tolerance in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). It could all (or mostly) be down to one genomic region.
- Historical changes in the process of agricultural development in Cuba. I suppose one could say that, in a way, it’s back to the future.
- Developing more productive African agroforestry systems and improving food and nutritional security through tree domestication. Participation, post-production, private-public partnership.
- Market-based mechanisms for biodiversity conservation: a review of existing schemes and an outline for a global mechanism. Need to have a standard unit of measurement, and a mechanism for ensuring a long-term perspective. Can agricultural biodiversity learn from this?