- That old perennial perennial grains featured in a new online magazine.
- @gr0b10d1v3r$1ty: Password to a More Secure Agriculture. See what Fabrice did there?
- Five games that will revolutionise your understanding of agricultural economics. No, really. We particularly like Bohnanza.
- The botanist in the kitchen looks at leeks; be ready for St David’s Day 2014.
- Most Ancient Romans Ate Like Animals. Prize for most obnoxious headline about NUS?
- Looking forward to BBC R4 on insectivory next week.
- Bangladesh encouraging agricultural diversification.
- A plague of locusts, just in time for Passover.
- Daily Kos does a big number on women in agriculture. Worth a bookmark.
- And Kew does a number on castor oil seeds. Breaking Bad fans will want to read it.
- We haven’t linked to a genome study for ages, so let’s hear it for bamboo.
- One of a whole lot of presentations from the recent Bio-innovate conference in Ethiopia, courtesy of ILRI.
Nibbles: Hunger meet, Collecting info, Mapping species, Fair trade, Irish Famine, Rice changes, Food podcast, Cow genomics
- Hidden hunger experts come out into the open.
- Bioversity germplasm collecting reports go online.
- Where the threatened species are.
- Fair trade, shmare trade.
- The Lumper makes a comeback.
- Rice innovation in Bangladesh, abandonment in Nepal.
- Cherfas smears himself in bog butter for new podcast.
- Genomics and the livestock industry.
Nibbles: UK horticulture funding, AVRDC, Biofortification, SRI debate, Stressed bees, Nutrient decline, Beneficial viruses, DNA for dummies, Chaffey, Cow genebank, Organic network
- For UK horticulturalists in need of cash. Wonder if that includes the rosemary collection.
- I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include AVRDC.
- Who would no doubt agree with Mark Lynas that “No-one disputes that a balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet is the best long-term solution to vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition in general.” And be as puzzled as the rest of us for the relative lack of funding for research on such a diet.
- A discussion of why mainstream agricultural science hasn’t got the message across about SRI, courtesy of Facebook. Yeah well, the whole concept of basing interventions on, you know, evidence, is not exactly mainstream. Just ask the balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet guys.
- Bees are stressed out, the poor things.
- Creative Commons graphs on changes in vegetable nutrient content.
- Not all plant viruses are bad.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison talks DNA, with his usual extraordinary fluency, from 11 mins in.
- Plant Cuttings! Everything from the botany of food to transcription factors for C4 photosynthesis.
- Cow genebank proposed.
- IFOAM gets a TIPI. Vandana Shiva no doubt ecstatic.
Which heath pea would that be?
Over at another place, I’ve been looking into the botanical confusion surrounding that essential of Roman cooking, mentuccia, which is not pennyroyal. And lest people are tempted to say, as they have before, “Get a life,” here’s another splendid example of the perils of common names. And these are in the same language.
Luigi noticed this strange website which is both touting the benefits of and seeking supplies of a plant it calls the heath pea. Why? Well, there are records of Scottish highlanders suppressing their appetites during hard times ((Must have run out of Caledonian tomatoes.)) by eating the heath pea’s tubers. The heath pea site helpfully provides loads of pictures and other information to help people identify the correct species. But here’s the thing. There are at least two plants that occasionally go by the name heath pea: Vicia ervillea and Lathyrus linifolius. Both are also sometimes called bitter vetch. And I certainly wouldn’t have known the difference had it not been for a blog post by one ferrebeekeeper, ‘fessing up to having got the two mightily confused.
Vicia ervillia is one of the founder crops, first domesticated in the Middle East all those years ago, and still cultivated there. But Lathyrus linifolia is the one the Scots should be looking for.
Doubly confusing, it seems that the Vicia causes lathyrism and the Lathyrus doesn’t. As it happens, we have an expert on Lathyrus and Vicia among our regular readers, and I don’t doubt that he’ll be along in just a second to sort things out properly.
Nibbles: Svalbard, Wayne Smith, Salinity, Tasty sorghum, NUS conference, Med collecting, Income and diversity, Agricultural packages
- Canadian genebank sends seeds to Svalbard.
- And Plant Breeder of the Year goes to… Bet you he used the genebank a lot.
- Dubai told to grow local plants to save water. There’s a genebank for that.
- More digestible sorghum down to one gene. Probably came from a genebank.
- A conference on neglected and underutilized species. And the genebanks that conserve them?
- Collecting on Mediterranean islands for Kew’s genebank. Nice gig if you can get it.
- Richer farmers more likely to adopt improved varieties. To him that has… So I guess genebanks should go to the poorer farmers to collect landraces? Always wondered about that.
- Can I help it if everything came up genebanks today?
- Well, almost everything. Agricultural packages unwrapped by the Archaeobotanist.