- Got a Neotropical flowering plant to identify? Kew has what you need.
- New Labour goes out with a whimper, and a swipe at cider-makers.
- Drought Timing for Agronomic Screening wins a prize.
- “We’ve heard about the Gene Bank project which serves to preserve certain cultivars and seed specimens, but we don’t know much else about this project.” Par for the course.
- Meanwhile, another genebank does get decent publicity.
- Women and homegardens in Bangladesh.
- Bag farms in Nairobi slum.
- Review of Dirt! The Movie.
- Boffins this close to drought-tolerant cowpeas.
- “…actual grain yield in some regions is already approximating its maximum possible yields while other regions show large yield gaps and therefore tentative larger potential for intensification.”
- The wife is going to the 1st International Symposium on Tropical Horticulture. Jamaica? No, she really wanted to go.
Nibbles: ICUC as was, Rice in Africa, Gardens, Botanical news, Durian, Fish and climate change, Nutrition in India video, Viruses in sweet potatoes, CBD, Wild tomatoes, Forst-tolerant apricots
- Change at the helm at Crops for the Future. Best wishes to all concerned.
- African Rice Congress wraps up. Successfully, no doubt.
- Tell you Sacred Garden story. Go on then…
- Nigel Chaffey rounds up botanical news. The best of the kind, for my money.
- The art of eating durian.
- Bye, and thanks for the fish.
- DFID on undernutrition in India. Very short on specifics. Where’s the varied diets stuff?
- Gotta virus clean those heirloom sweet potatoes.
- Latest from CBD ABS negotiations in Cali. Anybody there want to give us the scoop?
- Endemic wild tomato relatives from Atacama Desert… I dunno…investigated I guess.
- Russian boffin grows apricots in Siberia.
Sesame: not an open and shut case
Lack of time sometimes casts an interesting item as a Nibble, so it is good to have time to draw attention to a FARM-Africa project in Tanzania. A recent post on the Farm Africa blog updates a sesame project. The chair of the Sesame Marketing Group in one of the target villages explains:
[E]ven though the community has been harvesting sesame for years one of the big problems they face every year is the size of the sesame crop. The villagers tend to use a mixed bag of seeds, which means that the plants grow at different rates. As a consequence they are unable to harvest a large crop, or to sell in bulk.
He hopes that by using the seeds provided by FARM-Africa the villagers are able to produce a larger crop and generate a profit.
Looking back at the overview of the sesame marketing project, there are clearly some very good things in it. Farmer Production Groups will be helped to learn more about sesame production, will get equipment to measure oil and moisture content, will be connected with markets and market information, will be trained to clean and store seeds effectively, and much more besides. But the key seems to be the distribution of improved sesame varieties, “giving them the chance to grow a larger, higher quality sesame crop”.
All extremely worthwhile, and I for one hope that the project is an enormous success. But I would feel even better about it if the project included banking the local unimproved “mixed bag” of seeds. There are ex situ sesame collections, and efforts have been made to whittle them down to core collections. Before FARM-Africa’s successes cause Tanzanian growers to give up on their old varieties, I’d like to be assured that they are already being conserved somewhere.
Instead of all which, had I been pressed for time, I would simply have written “Open Sesame”.
Nibbles: Sheep genotypes, Farming Matters, African Rice Congress, Malawi food, Quinoa et al.
- Better sheep through information. From Australia, natch. Thanks, Dirk.
- New Farming Matters out. When did this ILEIA magazine change its name? Remains essential reading anyway.
- Some participants voice their expectations of the African Rice Congress.
- A traditional Malawi meal.
- Whole grain recipes.
HortCRSP published online map
Psst, wanna find out about horticultural projects around the world?
View Horticultural Projects in a larger map