- Brewery opens sorghum demonstration farm in Tanzania.
- Maybe California’s barley barons need to get into sorghum.
- Paddy Gene Bank nothing to do with Guinness.
- I really dislike the US habit of calling soil dirt, even when that allows alliteration about diversity and dirt.
- Who do you know worthy of the Word Food Prize?
- And the prize for jolting a dead cliché back to life goes to CIAT, for this stunner: International Photo Competition ‘Forest-Agriculture Interface: Gender Lens’.
Brainfood: Weird coconut, Rainforest management, Pollinators and grazing, Pre-Mendel, Italian grapes, Indian fibre species, Cereal relatives, Brazil nut silviculture
- Scope of novel and rare bulbiferous coconut palms (Cocos nucifera L.). Produces bulbils instead of floral parts.
- Holocene landscape intervention and plant food production strategies in island and mainland Southeast Asia. Like the Amazon.
- Grazing alters insect visitation networks and plant mating systems. More outcrossing in grazed birch woods.
- Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders’ Society of Moravia: Mendel’s Forgotten “Research Network.” Before peas, there were sheep.
- Genetic Characterization of Grape Cultivars from Apulia (Southern Italy) and Synonymies in Other Mediterranean Regions. About half are also grown somewhere else.
- Fibre-yielding plant resources of Odisha and traditional fibre preparation knowledge − An overview. 146 species, no less.
- Functional Traits Differ between Cereal Crop Progenitors and Other Wild Grasses Gathered in the Neolithic Fertile Crescent. How do cereal progenitors differ from all the other grasses our ancestors used to eat? Adaptation to competition and disturbance. They were weeds, basically.
- Testing a silvicultural recommendation: Brazil nut responses 10 years after liana cutting. Biodiversity bad for Brazil nuts.
Nibbles: CGIAR priorities, Drought tolerant rice, Agroecology bibliography, Amaranthus seed production video, Ethiopian genebank, Yemeni genebank
- UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
- Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
- Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
- How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
- Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
- There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.
Nibbles: New potatoes, Wild species, Native maize, Conservation course, Indigenous fishery, Yield trends
- Wild relative rescues potatoes. Which wild relative? Well for that you’ll have to read the paper. The FAQ on that. Or if you want an alternative. More the better, I guess. And just to remember what makes it all possible: diversity in fields and genebanks.
- Wild species not just useful to food security as sources of genes, of course. And more.
- Indigenous peoples save corn.
- Maybe some of them would be interested in this MSc at Bangor.
- Indigenous peoples can catch — and save? — fish after all.
- So is there stagnation in yield increases or what? Lobell reviews book that says maybe not.
Nibbles: Agroforestry slides, Sub1 slides, Fish slides, Fish in Neolithic, Silver bullets, Carbon credits, Camel domestication, Cuneiform barley
- All of the presentations from the World Congress on Agroforestry.
- Scuba rice in 13 slides.
- You got off easy on that last one. Here’s 55 slides on fish biodiversity and the food supply.
- Not much fish in the food supply of early farmers in Britain.
- New IFPRI book highlights technologies to beat hunger. Includes plant breeding. But no fish?
- Kenyan agroforestry organization gets C credits. Details sketchy though.
- The Bible got it wrong on camels. And that’s all I’m saying about that.
- Cuneiform tablets are so beautiful. Especially when they depict agricultural biodiversity. Via.