Neglected species

Nibbles: Vigna & Hordeum genome, Sorghum cold tolerance, Food atlas, Okra festival, Rice origins paper smackdown

Today’s genome is cowpea, yesterday’s was barley.
Maybe tomorrow’s will be sorghum?
More on that guerrilla food atlas thing.
So there’s an annual okra festival, and there’s a podcast about it.
Archaeobotanist says recent big rice genomics study changes nothing, is misleading. Why don’t you tell us what you really think, Dorian?

Up to their knees in wasabi. And, loving it.
iPlant Collaborative’s Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS) ver. 3.0 expands its coverage.
Marine bird e-Atlas goes live. Meah.
GFAR tweets about old videos. Must be a reason for it.
Podcast on using sweet potatoes in baby food. Might well come in useful more generally.
My friend Valerie and former employer SPC get a namecheck in story about world’s largest taro genebank.

Animal domestication is murder. Will someone tell ILRI? And the Maasai.
Indian home remedies at risk from nasty patents. I guess someone has been reading the Washington Post.
Agriculture started as a response to the need for large amounts of beer for feasts. Can’t think of a better reason. All the more weird that it seemed to go pear-shaped in Britain, then, after a good start. Maybe everybody was drunk?
The UK’s National Fruit Collection in the spotlight. So after that dodgy period, British agriculture did manage to get a grip, thank goodness. Probably for the cider.
Multiple copies of a gene needed for nematode resistance in soybeans.
PETting plants.
“Ten principles to apply at the nexus of agriculture, conservation, and other land uses.” And almost anything else for that matter.
Those ICRAF spatial databases explained.
Bhoo Chetana in India and, admittedly under another name, in Peru. Transformation often means reviving old ways.
Free posters of Top 10 plant-attacking nasties.

Drought threatens rare rice varieties. What d’you mean they’re not in genebanks?
Has video dimmed the radio’s star?
Wanna get a PhD in “climate services for development“? Course you do.
Apple harvest fails. Turns out you need a diversity of agricultural labourers too.
Medlars. I love it when people treat my familiar stuff as highly exotic.

If you liked our piece of a couple years back on a remarkable Indian mango tree, you’ll love Bhuwon’s latest, fuller write-up.
Open-source seeds? Isn’t that what the ITPGRFA was supposed to be ensuring?
How fisherfolk in Indonesia protect the reef.
Going wild turkey.
Mapping Cameroon’s forests. Interactively, of course.
A perennial roundup.
Old Fritz and the potato. Maybe genebanks should take a leaf (or tuber) out of his book?
“What constituted beauty, she wondered, in the scientist’s eye?”